INSIDE HIM THE SINFUL PRESSURE built up. Inside him the need to fulfill the mad obsession that claimed him reached a peak. And outside him there were others who faced a similar problem, and his sly but cautious manner allowed him to observe, to bide his time. For in this world of clouded minds, passions were exploding, and his own promised to be a nightmare of degradation that society would shun as a shameful sanctum of sin....
CHAPTER ONE
All day long, the pressure of anticipation had been building.
It had been a struggle to keep it from showing in his face, and it had now reached a point requiring constant adjustment of his clothing to conceal a more obvious manifestation. He thanked the fates that it was early fall; without his topcoat, his secret would surely have been revealed to the eyes of the world.
Several times at the office, he had been on the verge of giving up his original plan, seeking some privacy, and relieving himself. But he had controlled the urge, for he ached for something more than just relief.
He wanted pleasure.
He needed pleasure.
So he waited.
That morning, there had been no more than a dull, barely noticeable ache that he had been aware of only because of its familiarity.
By three o'clock, the time of the afternoon coffee break, the pressure had grown into a pain. He had to fight to keep his discomfort from distorting his face. He passed up his customary container of coffee because he was afraid to meet the eyes of his coworkers, afraid that the awful heat in him would somehow be visible in his eyes, afraid that his secret might announce itself. He stayed at his desk while the others took their break, bent over his accountant's ledger, his fingers stiff and trembling around the barrel of his pen.
Now it was five o'clock. The work day was ended at last.
The pressure-pain of his anticipation was almost too great to be borne.
He left the office without saying good night to any of his fellow employees. As he walked to the elevator, it was necessary for him to adjust his topcoat several times. He rode down to the street, bought an evening newspaper in his building's lobby, folded it, and held it cautiously concealing until he had descended into the subway.
The ride uptown was an ordeal. He was packed into the rush-hour car with people on all sides of him. His body came into tingling contact with a number of young girls, and this only made his agitation deepen. Also, it burdened him with the additional worry that one of the youthful females might lean back against him at the wrong moment and at the fatal angle, that she might suddenly recognize the sinful caress of his excitement against her buttocks, perhaps even against her soft legs.
He held the folded paper in place beneath his belt with as much fervor as if he had been naked.
And, at last, the subway ride was over.
He let the crowd carry him along the station and up the long ramp. It was difficult to detach himself from the flow without revealing his excitement, but somehow he managed. As he climbed the steps to the street, he felt an uncomfortable shifting inside his trousers, and yearned for a moment of privacy so that he might adjust his clothing. But that was impossible. He added this new discomfort to those he'd been suffering all day, and pushed it to the back of his mind.
Times Square was thronged with people and vehicles as he emerged from the subway exit. It was nearly dark, and the little light left in the sky was swallowed in the antic blaze of racing neon. All around him signs blinked and flared, advertising food, liquor, dancing, motion pictures, and pleasure, but he had no eyes for any of it.
The sort of pleasure he craved was not advertised in neon.
He moved with the mobs surging west on Forty-second Street toward Eighth Avenue. He knew better than to glance in the windows of the many book and magazine stores he passed; the sight of the beckoning near-nude women in those store windows would only feed his excitement and make it harder to bear. In spite of this knowledge, however, his eye was seduced unexpectedly by a poster display in front of a motion picture house. A nudist film was playing, and the lobby of the theater was filled with photos of naked people-female, male, even children. On each of the photos, areas were blocked from view by narrow strips of black tape, but somehow this concealment only made the nudity more pronounced, more blatant, and far more exciting.
One shot in particular caught his attention. A man and a woman, wearing only scraps of tape, were playing tennis in a sunlit court. The girl had her back to the viewer. The man was poised opposite her on tiptoe, his tennis racket raised high above his head. He seemed about to charge forward and beat the girl with the racket.
The photo remained in sight only an instant, but even after he had passed the theater he couldn't get the tableau out of his head. In his mind's eye, he could see the tennis racket smacking down against the girl's naked buttocks, could hear the satisfying sound it would make, could visualize the cross-hatching of red welts the strings would leave impressed on her rounded flesh.
He shuddered, and clutched the newspaper to himself more tightly.
At the corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, he turned right and began walking north. The crowds had thinned out, but there were still far too many people on the street for comfort.
He had never been able to make up his mind whether or not he liked crowds. In a way, the presence of many people around him posed a threat; with enough eyes to watch you, almost any secret might reveal itself sooner or later. But, on the other hand, there was a certain safety in the anonymity of a crowd; as long as you were nothing more than a corpuscle in the sluggish flow of humanity, your identity-and your secrets-were of no interest.
It was important to him that no one become interested in his identity and his secrets. It had happened to him once, a long time before, and he had no wish that it happen again.
He was in the upper Forties now, within a block of his goal. His steps gradually slowed, and he -edged over to the right in order to be near the store windows. He began to feign an interest in the displays, pausing now and then to examine a pyramid of bottled vitamins in the window of a drug store, to stare at magic tricks and novelties in a souvenir shop. It was a sham, but an old familiar one, and he did it expertly. If anyone had been watching him, they would have thought his interest quite genuine.
But no one was watching him.
At last, his steps carried him abreast of his destination. Carefully holding his face rigid, he stopped in front of the window.
It was filled with a dusty display of books and magazines. The periodicals were back numbers from several years earlier, and showed their age in the yellowing of their pages. The books were mostly paperbacks, their covers mutilated by time and careless readers.
There was a length of twine strung across the upper half of the window, and clipped to it with spring clothespins were a number of men's magazines of the urban fiction and naked woman variety. The girls on the covers displayed their flesh archly, revealing a great deal, but concealing much more behind wisps of veil, folds of robe, lacy undergarments. Like the nude people in the theater lobby display, their efforts at modesty were somehow more immodest than total nakedness.
He let his eyes roam casually over the contents of the window, not really seeing any of it. The display was familiar to him; it never changed. The pattern of books and magazines was to him like a favorite painting to an art-lover, calling forth an emotional response by virtue of association.
He associated the window with the store beyond it.
He associated the store with the material that fed his pleasure.
Display equals pleasure-he stood for several seconds staring at it, letting the old responses build in him, remembering the many other times he had stood in front of the window. As usual, the excitement was not all pleasure; in addition to the enjoyment of anticipation, there was a fearful, heart-pounding aspect to the emotion he felt.
Looking through that window, sensing the accumulating pressure of his hungers, he knew his secret was as close to the surface as he could ever allow it to get. There was peril in the moment, but there was also a certain amount of challenge, and he took pride in his ability to keep his face stony, keep the desire in him from showing itself in his face.
He tore his eyes finally from the display and sidestepped away from the window into the store's shallow vestibule. The door was glass, and there was an open sign taped to it at eye level. The position of the sign made it impossible for a person on the street to see the faces of those inside, unless he bent his knees to peek under it.
There were people in the store. He saw male trousers and feet near the paperback table, and his heart sank. It was bad enough that there were customers in the place-since their presence would only slow up the process of his business-but paperback browsers were the worst of all. Such people could literally spend hours thumbing through books, oblivious of everything around them, especially of the fact that someone might be waiting to speak to the proprietor in private. He had seen it happen. He had suffered through such times before, browsing around the store through items which interested him not at all, biting back the acid of frustration that rose into his throat, waiting impatiently for the other customers to leave.
He wondered if he would be able to go through such a siege that evening. The need in him was terrible that his calm exterior might very well crack if he was forced to wait too long. He considered briefly going to a restaurant or bar in the vicinity and killing some time. Perhaps the store would have emptied in an hour or so.
He decided against it. In his present frame of mind, killing time would be impossible. He would be better off inside the store, close to the object of his hungers.
He pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The man behind the cash register turned to look at him. He was a slim man, with a gray, pouchy face, and eyes opaque as pearl. Nothing in his expression showed any sign of recognition. After a moment, he turned back to his newspaper.
The proprietor seemed like an old friend. He was nothing more than a salesman, of course, a peddler of specialized merchandise, but he possessed a quality that certain of his customers found welcome.
He was detached. He didn't care who you were, nor did it matter to him what you were. If he could serve you to your satisfaction, he would do so without a twitch of expression, without even meeting your eyes, as if your desires were something apart from you, as if the universal tendency of a man to judge his fellow men did not exist in him.
There were damned few people in the world like the proprietor. Experience had taught him that.
He closed the door behind him and moved past the cash register toward a rack of magazines.
The waiting began.
Although it was annoying, the waiting was not so bad in itself. Empty time was the enemy, the lack of anything on which to focus the mind. Without an object of interest, his brain tended to turn back in on itself, into the dark storerooms of memory and past experience. This wasn't always an unwelcome process; several of his memories were pleasant enough to reward re-examination. But it depended on the occasion, and when he was stalling for time, trying to make the minutes fly through sheer force of desire, when the hunger was big in him and he was forced to wait for satisfaction, wait until circumstances had u cleared his path-when that was the situation, then the recollection of the past could be a definite pain.
Recalling other times he had found satisfaction only increased the pressure of the moment.
But he was powerless to keep it from happening. The gates of memory swung slowly open, and he found himself looking through them, against his will, at something that had happened over ten years before.
He was thirty years old. He was standing in a room. It was poorly furnished, with a paper-thin carpet on the floor, a scarred table, some battered chairs, a bureau with a cracked mirror above it....
And a bed.
On the bed sat a girl. She went with the room. In a subtle way, she seemed almost as poorly kept and worn out by time as the furniture, although he knew she was no older than twenty, and possibly as young as sixteen.
It was so hard to tell with the professionals.
He had found her in a bar, sitting alone at a table near the back, watching the male customers come and go with hard, emotionless eyes. It had been her hardness which first attracted him. He noticed her the moment he entered the place. His eyes examined her face, the bare flesh above the low-cut sweep of her neckline, the beginnings of a cleavage which looked firm, the paired thrustings of the breasts like the pointed heads of twin artillery shells, the slightly muscular arms crossed on the table, the thin ringless fingers, the diamond-hard sheen of heavy polish on the nails.
She looked fashioned of hard rubber and metal.
She drew him like a magnet to her table.
They hardly spoke to each other. Words were unnecessary. He knew why she was sitting there, and what she was waiting for. He knew instantly that she was a professional.
And she knew in the same moment that he was a customer.
So the bargain was struck, swiftly, efficiently. They left the bar side by side, but without touching each other, and she led the way to her apartment. She made no apologies for the place, nor did he require any. The girl suited his needs, and he would have gladly used her in a garbage dump if necessary.
Now she was sitting on the bed, and he was standing with one elbow braced against the top of the bureau, looking at her. She had removed her dress. Under it, she wore a stained bra which could barely hold the massive forms of her breasts. Flesh spilled tautly over the elastic edges. She was also wearing panties; like the bra, the material was thin.
He watched as she undid the garter snaps which held her stockings. She dipped her fingers into the back of her panties, unfastened the belt, and drew it out. The snaps disappeared up the legs of her undergarment. She tossed the belt on a chair near the bed.
She glanced at him sidelong, and spoke for the first time since they had entered the room.
"Is that all right with you?"
"What?" he asked, puzzled.
"The garter-belt. I should of asked you first. You want my stockings on, or what?"
"No," he said. "Take off your stockings." He paused and smiled. "Take off everything."
She didn't return his smile.
Her elbows winged out as her hands sought up her back for the fastening of her bra. For a moment, the ridges of flesh grew white with tension against the elastic. Then the brassiere opened. It dropped cupsdown in her lap as the huge teardrops of her breasts settled free on her torso.
The bra had left red welts in her firm flesh.
The sight of that did something to him. The idea that anything could make marks in such solid breasts was fascinating enough, but it was the welts themselves which really intoxicated him.
Red welts. Tracks of pain.
It reminded him of-what? He couldn't quite recall.
The welts framed an enormous pair of nipples, each almost as large as a donut. From the centers of them stood forth brownish-pink tips. The dark coral flesh of her breast-caps tasted the chill air of the room, then drew in on themselves, ridging and puckering and solidifying until their thrust was as firm as all the hard-rubber meat of her body.
She tossed the bra after the garter-belt, then stood up. With a single easy motion, she drew her panties down from her waist, down to reveal her hips, her round waist in front, her fleshy buttocks in back, down still further to the beginnings of her legs, then down and off each of her uplifted feet in turn.
He watched muscle play along her calves as she got her legs free of the panties. He saw the tense workings of her spine and the flexing of her mounded buttocks as she turned to throw the panties over with the rest of her clothing. He watched, with a sudden sense of dryness in his mouth, as she turned her body toward him.
The room's only light, a single overhead bulb, shed its harsh illumination down the length of her body, casting small dots of shadow beneath her excited nipples, making deep pools of darkness under her breasts.
Hard as a rock, but at the same time yielding.
That was how she seemed to him in that instant-like a cold marble statue sheathed in a thin layer of rubber. He wondered if it would be possible to shift any of that flesh, if her breasts would move under his hands or if they would continue to thrust out with the same strange firmness even when she was on her back, even while his palms leaned to her with all the weight of his body behind them.
He wondered if a man could possibly take her without her consent. He doubted it. She looked so strong....
Then he remembered the welts, the red welts, and all at once she seemed quite vulnerable.
She was standing naked with her hands on her ample hips. Her head tilted to one side.
"Well?" she said. "Do you want me, or not?"
He straightened up and began removing his clothes. She watched him for a moment longer, then turned away and climbed onto the bed.
Red welts.
He still couldn't fathom why the marks left by her bra should have affected him so. Small marks of irritation-they were so unimportant compared with the facts that she was a wanton, firmly-fleshed woman, that she was naked, that she was ready for him, that she was bought and paid for and ready for his pleasure.
Why should he think of welts at a time like that?
Why think of red welts, and the fact that they were manifestations of pain, when pleasure was waiting for him?
Why indeed?
He had no answer for the question, but it continued to fill his head just the same. The girl was on her back. Her body faced him.
She had set her feet wide on the bed. Her arms were lifted to receive him.
As he expected, her breasts pointed almost straight up at the ceiling.
"Hurry, champ," she said, her voice hard and a bit weary. "Let's start."
His clothing was gone. He was naked. As he crossed the room toward her, he felt the air caressing him, felt the excitement preceding him like a weapon. It was his strength, and he drew power from the knowledge of that.
He knelt on the bed, shifting his knees.
The weapon.
And red welts.
He leaned, and dropped his cupped palms to her breasts. Her flesh yielded a bit more than he expected, but he wasn't really disappointed. The roughened tips of her nipples prodded against his palms like chess pieces imbedded in mounds of warm rubber.
She touched him. Her hands turned palm-up to grasp him, guided him to her.
There was a moment of suspension. Then a touch. Then more than a touch-a darkness, a secret velvetness.
"Let's go," she said, gazing at him matter-of-factly. "Why drag this out?"
She didn't wait for his answer.
Because he had already started.
He made a sound-a complicated harmony of separate noises. The creak of the bedsprings, the crisp whisper of the sheets, the gusts of their breathing, all blended to produce a special sound.
The sound of pleasure.
The sound of love.
The sound of welts.
Red welts.
But that was silly. Welts made no sound. The thought was nonsense. Or was it?
A wound made no noise, but a weapon did. To produce a welt, something must collide with flesh, something hard, something swift, something brutal. Afterward, red welts-but before that, a sound, harsh and savage.
First the sound.
Then the welt.
Then pleasure.
His mind was adrift in a sea of his own thoughts. Somewhere his body romped with the lush flesh of the girl, his hands mauled her breasts, his lips kissed and drew against the ripe berries of her breasts.
His mind knew all of this, but was detached from it, floating high above the two bodies struggling on the bed. His mind saw the girl's strong arms hitch up around his back. His mind also saw her fingers hooking into talons and finding a perch just beneath his shoulderblades.
His mind saw that, and it reminded him of something, but he couldn't think what it was.
All he could think of were the red welts.
Then, suddenly, her curled fingers dug at his back, the painted nails biting into his flesh like claws.
Red welts.
Thin lines at first, thickening rapidly, weeping blood.
High above, his mind saw it happen. The parallel crimson tracks on his skin blossomed into stripes, into ribbons, into bands, into bars....
Mind and body rushed together with a thunderclap as the liquid lightning of exploded release, and the pleasure drowned him, and the red welts seemed to wrap him, ropes of red-wet pain, bonds of shuddering delight, and something happened, something fantastic was born in his brain, and his body found the rhythm, and his fingers left the girl's heaving breasts and went somewhere else on her body, and he did something, and the red welts filled his mind until he heard someone screaming and realized it was himself, not the girl, but himself, screaming, and the welts had him in a coiled grip, like that of a giant constricting snake, and there was a hand suddenly touching his shoulder, and he whirled, blinking his eyes against the unexpected glare of reality. The memory was ended.
The proprietor of the store dropped his hand. His eyes skewed sideways, looking at nothing. His voice was quiet, unaccusing.
"I got something for you."
"You have?" He lifted his palm and passed it across his head. The dream had left a rime of sweat on his forehead. His eyebrows were soaked.
"Yeah," said the proprietor. "Pack of pictures. Glossies. The kind you bought before." He paused. "Only better."
"Can I see them?"
The proprietor shook his head. "Don't have the time. Finally got rid of those other guys, but there'll be more coming in any second." He made a small gesture with his hand. "Have I ever steered you wrong?"
"No."
"You always got the real stuff? Always what you wanted?"
"Yes."
"Come on. I got it all wrapped up behind the counter." He turned and walked to the register. "How much?"
"Ten," said the proprietor. "And worth it."
"How many pictures?"
"A dozen-more, I think. I didn't count them. They're good stuff."
He bit his lip, then reached inside his coat for his wallet. He laid a ten-dollar bill beside the cash register.
The proprietor took it and put it somewhere under the counter. When his hand came up again, it was holding a slim package about the size of a digest magazine.
He took the package from the proprietor's fingers and looked blankly at it.
"Inside your coat. Come on-somebody could come in."
"Oh, of course." He started to unbutton his topcoat, but stopped when he remembered his condition. He managed to slip the package in an outside pocket. It made a bulge.
The proprietor nodded once, then shook out his newspaper and began reading again.
The sky was black when he came into the street. Stars burned overhead, but they could not compete with the neon-ribbons of light which crawled like red welts across the faces of all the buildings.
CHAPTER TWO
Linda Curtis stood at the corner of Broad-way and Fortieth Street, smoking a cigarette calmly and watching the crowds move by.
She was a young girl, and very beautiful. Her face was soft, her nose was pert, her lips moist and generous, her eyes a Siamese cat blue, her hair a deep honey gold. The only lines in her features were twin sets of small crinkles around her eyes; it was obvious she laughed a lot.
She was wearing a light tan coat, which hung open to reveal the fawn-colored sheath beneath it. Her body fitted the dress well, thrusting tightly against the material in the regions of her breasts and hips, but accenting the narrowness of her waist in the way the cloth buckled and folded over. The hem of her dress was cut straight across her knees. Her legs were smooth and clean, her ankles delicately-boned, her feet encased in tan leather pumps. The hand which held her cigarette was slim-fingered and pretty.
Everything about her was pretty.
A person passing Linda as she stood on that corner would have to notice her, especially if that person happened to be a male. Her prettiness attracted the eye, and, to a certain extent, invited speculation. But the speculation could never go very far.
A girl as lovely as Linda called to mind the immediate association of softness, warmth, nakedness, pleasure. Her body was totally feminine, and so was the way she wore her clothes and the expression on her face. Linda was all girl, built for bedtime enjoyment, and you couldn't help but notice that.
But an instant later, you would notice something else about Linda, and you'd know you were defeated before you'd even begun. Linda had class. The cool calmness of her stance, the artistic bearing of that beautiful body, the total self-possession of her gaze, all tended to crush any casual thoughts of taking her to bed. One look would tell you she wouldn't be available easily, if at all.
Not that she was a virgin-experience had left an obvious stamp on her young features-but a girl like that, a girl as beautiful and serene as that, simply had to be already taken.
As it happened, that impression was correct. Linda was already taken, was in fact waiting on that corner for her boy friend. Linda and her boy friend had gone to bed together many times, and she was expecting to go to bed with him again tonight. She was enjoying the anticipation of pleasure, but it didn't show on her face, because that wasn't what she was thinking about. Inside that pretty, flighty head, her mind was on something completely non-sensual.
Linda was thinking about her roommate.
She shared a bachelor-girl apartment with Dana Trask, a woman about ten years older than herself. It was a purely utilitarian arrangement; the two girls were not really friends. Their only common bond was that they were both employed on the staff of a fashion magazine called Chic.
The difference in age between Linda and Dana tended to discourage friendship. None of Linda's acquaintances appealed to Dana, or vice-versa, and that also kept them apart. Their jobs were bound up in the ideal of female clothing, but their personal notions of dress couldn't have been more different; Linda favored soft, feminine things, knowing the way in which the right garment could emphasize the prettiness of her figure; but Dana was the sort of girl who preferred tight blouses and slacks, mannish clothing that would conceal the curves of her body.
Dana really did have a very nice body. In the course of living together, Linda had caught several glimpses of Dana partially or completely unclothed, and she knew that her roommate's figure was all that any woman could possibly ask. If there were anything she lacked, it was softness, but somehow that didn't matter. Dana's figure was tight and firm, and the solidity of her flesh went with her personality, the way she talked, the friends and amusements she preferred.
So Linda and Dana were not actually friends, and Linda doubted if they ever would be.
But that fact was not what bothered her.
Linda had moved in with Dana three months ago. The two girls hadn't known very much about each other, and weren't even sure at the time that they would get along in the same apartment. They decided to share the rooms on a trial basis, and wait to see how things worked out.
To a certain extent, things worked out fine. They didn't get on each other's nerves at all. They could chat together easily, or just as easily sit on opposite sides of the same room in perfect silence, if that happened to be the mood of the moment. Both girls were neat, but neither was fanatical about it. Similar tastes in food made a communal refrigerator possible.
They never discussed their love-lives together, although each of them knew the other had one. They had arranged in the beginning to conduct their amorous affairs away from the apartment whenever possible, or to arrange their fun to coincide with the other girl's night out, and then had dropped the subject altogether. As a result, Dana had never met Linda's boy friend. Nor had Linda ever met any boy friends of Dana's.
But she had met some of Dana's girl friends.
And that was what bothered her.
Every once in a while, a female acquaintance of Dana's would show up at the apartment for an evening of talk. There was no reason for Linda to leave on these occasions, but she usually did anyway, inventing some excuse for going out to the store. There was something about Dana's girl friends that made her very uncomfortable.
Or was it the friends themselves? Sometimes Linda wasn't so sure. The girls weren't so different in manner and personality from Dana, and if Linda could tolerate the company of one girl, there was no reason why she couldn't do the same for another girl of a similar type.
The problem was the atmosphere which was generated every time one of Dana's friends dropped by. Ordinarily, their shared apartment was a quiet and comfortable place, but as soon as one of those girls walked in, the temperature seemed to fall. All at once, there would be an electricity in the atmosphere, and strange tension which had no place in the simple meeting of two girls who knew each other.
It was this feeling which drove Linda out of the apartment.
And quite often, she wondered if that wasn't exactly what Dana and her friends wanted.
There was something strange about the arrangement, but Linda couldn't fathom it. She kept telling herself it was her imagination; nevertheless, the question was in her mind more and more often these days.
What happened between Dana and her odd friends while Linda was away from the apartment? What could happen? Linda just didn't know.
She took a final drag on her cigarette, then dropped it to the pavement and ground it out under one spiked heel. She glanced at her watch, looked up, and spotted Jack Wilde coming through the crowd toward her.
She smiled and lifted a hand. "Here I am," she said. Her voice was as cool and feminine as the rest of her.
"Hi, beautiful," he said, coming up to her and taking her arm. "Am I late?"
"Just in time. Right on the button." She wrinkled her nose. "I must be important to rate promptness like that."
"I must be pretty important, too."
"What makes you think that?"
He grinned. "You were here early."
She laughed and clutched her elbow close to her side. His hand was trapped against the under-curve of one yielding breast. "Let's go to dinner," she said. "We can talk about how important we are to each other after we've filled our stomachs. I'm hungry."
"Me, too," he replied. "And not only for food."
"Later, you madman. We'll have plenty of time."
"There's no such thing," he said.
They laughed, and went arm in arm to the curb. He hailed a taxi, gave the driver the address of their favorite restaurant, and settled into the back seat beside her. They made light conversation during the ride uptown, but there was a serious undercurrent in their words. Linda felt a small twinge of pleasure when Jack moved his leg over against hers, and returned the pressure knowingly.
She and Jack had met for the first time shortly after Linda had moved into the apartment with Dana. She had been between boy friends at the time, and although she hadn't actually been looking, she was prepared to welcome any likely male who happened along.
There weren't many men who suited her needs. For one thing, her beauty and composure unnerved the average male, and she couldn't stand a man who wasn't completely sure of himself. For another thing, Linda didn't become friendly with a fellow unless she intended to utimately go to bed with him, and fumbling nervousness in bed was the most repulsive thing she could think of.
To satisfy Linda, a man had to be self-assured, reasonably good looking, reasonably experienced with women, and indulgent enough to allow for the fact that she was an individual, a girl with specific ideas about the conduct of her life, and not just a female to be bedded at all costs. If a man could meet all these requirements, Linda was prepared to go as far as he wanted.
She met Jack at lunch one day in a midtown restaurant. Right from the start, she was certain he was her kind of male, and their first few dates together had only made her conviction grow. By the time their relationship had progressed to the point where he invited her to his apartment for a drink, Linda had been ready and willing to welcome him with open arms.
And so she had.
And that had been terrific for them both. Afterward, she had told him with perfect honesty how fine his love-making had been, and he returned the compliment with just as much candor. Although the words weren't spoken, they both understood that their friendship would never ripen into love, but neither of them cared about that. Jack was a professional bachelor, who would marry only when he became too dried-up to take care of a woman, if then. Linda felt pretty much the same way about it.
So their friendship got off to a fine start, an honest start, with nothing concealed, no lies told, and no possibility of anyone getting hurt when the time came to call it quits.
That had been three months ago, and quitting-time wasn't yet in sight.
Linda really enjoyed loving Jack. He was a squarely-built and powerful man, and the sight of his body in the nude simply sent chills up her spine. She loved his chest, which was crisped with hair and plated with solid muscle; she loved the sensation of that chest pressing against her bared breasts, flattening them and making them tingle against her breathing rib-cage. She loved his hands, relishing the strength of his fingers when they scooped under her and grabbed her buttocks. She loved the flatness of his waist, she loved the feeling of her own rounded body molding up against him, loved the solidity of his hips, she loved the strength of his arms as they wrapped around her arching torso.
Most of all, she loved the feeling of his invasion, the inexorable power of him, driving deep into the secret warmth of her, moving with an almost brutal force, calling forth a rich pleasure that was just this side of pain.
Of all the men Linda had known in her life, Jack was the best.
She wasn't ashamed to let him know it.
And that made him even better.
They saw each other on an average of three times a week, and not always with the intention of going to bed. Sometimes, they spent their evenings seeing plays or movies; their tastes in entertainment were almost identical. On other occasions, they would simply go to a quiet bar somewhere, take a booth near the back, and just talk.
But more often than not, they would wind up in Jack's bachelor apartment, both in the same mood, both primed for pleasure, both ready to share the release of all their most intimate hungers.
Tonight was one of those nights.
Linda had been thinking about it all day at the magazine offices. She and Jack had left their plans for the evening open when they'd made the date, but by the time she got out of work that afternoon she knew exactly what she wanted to do.
As usual, it wasn't necessary to tell Jack. Another of the things which made them so good together was a real sensitivity to each other's moods. It was seldom necessary for Linda to ask Jack for anything-he would sense her desires, and satisfy them.
Before their taxi had even reached the restaurant, the unspoken agreement had been reached.
At the restaurant, they had a few drinks, then ate a leisurely dinner. They split a bottle of dry wine between them during the course of the meal, skipped dessert, and ordered a few more drinks.
Linda felt the alcohol begin to bubble in her veins, and smiled to herself. She liked to get a little high before going to Jack's apartment; she liked the way her flesh tingled, the way his strong hands and powerful body could extinguish that tingling.
When they left the restaurant, Linda was a trifle unsteady on her feet, but it didn't bother her a bit. Jack had his arm linked through hers, and every time she sagged, the ripe weight of a breast would cuddle into the crook of his elbow. She liked that.
The taxi ride to his apartment seemed to take forever. Several times, she was on the verge of putting her fingers under the tails of his jacket and teasing him, but she held off. She could sense that he was just as anxious to get his hands on her, and the thought of that put her in a giddy mood.
She started giggling.
"What's funny?" he asked.
She glanced at the impassive head of the driver, then leaned over to speak in his ear. "I want to get loved," she said.
His hand appeared suddenly between the car seat and her hip, fingers curled to cup a buttock. "Is that something to laugh about?"
"I'll stop laughing soon enough. Don't worry."
"I hope so. If not...."
"If not-what?"
"Well-I don't much like girls who laugh a lot. So I guess I'll just have to make you stop laughing."
She wriggled against his palm. "So make me."
He chuckled. "Glad to oblige." His fingers squeezed her globed flesh. "We're here, beautiful."
She looked out the car window and saw the familiar front of his apartment building. "Pay the man," she said, nodding at the driver. "And hurry."
He hurried.
They both hurried, out of the car, across the pavement, into the lobby, up in the elevator to his floor, then down the hall and through the door of the apartment. He let her in ahead of him, locked the door behind them, then turned just in time to receive the whole length of her body flush against his.
Her lips opened and the pink tip of her tongue prodded for a single searching instant. Then his own mouth was sealed to hers, and they clung frantically together.
She felt him move, then felt one of his strong arms scoop behind her knees and lift her from the floor. She breathed her pleasure as he carried her across the darkened living room and into the bedroom. He set her down on the bed and began removing her clothing.
She did nothing to help him, but that was all right, because he needed no help. He got off her coat with one hand while holding her up from the bed with the other, handling her body as easily as if she were a rag doll. Her sheath dress came off just as effortlessly.
She didn't usually bother with slips, and was wearing only bra, panties, garter-belt, and stockings. His fingers undid the clasps, then rolled the sheer nylons off her long, lovely legs. He cupped the backs of her calves briefly, then slid his palms along her naked legs.
She trembled.
He took off the garter-belt next, then her brassiere. Her lush breasts settled wall-eyed as the cups lifted away, and she felt the sensitive discs of the nipples solidifying with anticipation.
His fingers were at her waist, hooking into the elastic of her panties. The undergarment seemed to drift away from her like smoke.
She lay crossways on the bed, her legs dangling over the edge, her arms at her sides, her breasts quivering with every breath she took, her eyes closed.
She was utterly nude, everything revealed for him, everything readied, every inch aching with the need of him.
Dimly, she heard the clink of his belt buckle, then the rustle of his trousers, his jacket, his shirt. His shoes made two thumps on the floor. She waited, her eyes still closed, until the sounds of undressing had stopped.
She opened her eyes.
He was standing by her, naked and ready. The sight of him cut through her languor, and she pushed herself up into a sitting position.
"Ready?" he asked, grinning at her. "You look ready."
"You're the one who looks ready," she said. "I am," he replied.
She reached out and brushed the tips of her fingers across his abdomen. "Well, I'm not."
"Aren't you?"
"No. There's something I want to do first."
"And what might that be?" She told him.
"Really?" he said. "I'm surprised. I thought you were in a hurry."
"I am," she said.
"Then why waste time like that? Why not just go on to something we both enjoy?"
She chuckled huskily. "You silly man. What makes you think I don't enjoy that?"
"Do you?"
"Of course, I do." Her drifting fingers gently touched. "I'll show you," she said. She showed him.
His hands smoothed her hair, palmed the back of her head, slid tenderly down over her hollowed cheeks, down along the line of her jaw, down across her shoulders. He bent slightly at the waist and lowered his hands still further until he was weighing the pendant forms of her breasts.
She brought out her hands to grasp his hips. Her breath whistled in her nostrils.
This was not a caress she had given many men in her life. Her enjoyment was based primarily on how much she thought of the man, and she had to have a pretty high opinion of a particular guy before she felt the urge to express herself that way. But when the man was a fellow worthy of the name, and when she was really in the mood-usually after a few drinks-there were damned few things she enjoyed more.
No-holds-barred, complete acceptance of all his personal quirks, that was what turned her on. Linda felt that if a man was worth kissing, genuinely worth the caress of a girl's lips, then he was worth kissing anywhere.
Everywhere.
She had done this for Jack only once before, and then just briefly during the course of a wild naked tangle on the bed. That time, she had no sooner captured him than he'd heaved over and offered a similar kiss to her. It had come as such a surprise that she forgot her original intention, and a moment later she found herself ready for his customary assault.
This time, she was determined to make that last.
His fingers twitched against her breasts as she built the pleasure for him. His breathing became ragged. When he spoke, his voice came from high in his throat.
"That's good, baby," he said. "That's so damned good-you act as if you really enjoy this, and I never met a girl who did before. That's right, isn't it? You do, don't you?"
Yes, she nodded emphatically-yes, yes!
And that was the truth.
She kept working for quite a while, lost in the heady passion. He was in her power, and it thrilled her to think that she could take over such a strong and self-reliant male so completely. The action held so much pleasure for her that she forgot herself, forgot about the passage of time, forgot the reason she and Jack had originally come here, forgot everything but what she was doing.
Most important of all, she forgot a certain immutable law of the flesh.
If she'd spent a moment to think about it, she would have realized what the ultimate result of such a caress would be, and would have stopped in time. But she didn't bother to think; she let her reason be swallowed by the pleasure of the moment.
It was a mistake.
She felt him tremble suddenly. His fingers were pressing deeply into her breasts.
And that, although she didn't realize it, was the point of no return.
She should have stopped.
But she didn't.
It was an even bigger mistake.
An instant before the finish, she suddenly realized her error. But there was no time to rectify the mistake. There was time only for her to think what an idiot she had been, to contemplate what was about to happen, and to know that everything was going to be spoiled.
And there was time for one further thought: Jack hadn't stopped her. He could have-he should have-but he hadn't. He'd simply stood like an idiot, allowed her to offer the most personal caress she knew, and had taken advantage of her by letting that caress proceed to a natural conclusion.
An unnatural conclusion.
He froze, lifting on tiptoe, straining, his fingers gripping her breasts painfully. She tried to pull away, but his hands were holding her too tightly.
There was nothing for her to do but wait.
That took forever.
Finally, his stiffened body subsided. He released her breasts. She pushed against him with all her might and felt him stumble back away from her.
His legs were trembling, and his arms hung numb and useless at his sides as he staggered backward. He didn't seem to realize what had happened; his gaze was congested with lust, his face slack with release.
One foot encountered the leg of a chair, and he fell heavily, slamming his head against the base of a floor-standing metal ash tray.
She leaped from the bed and ran for the bathroom without even stopping to look at him. At that moment, she didn't care particularly whether he lived or died. She cared about nothing but the awesome sickness which tore at her.
The expensive dinner came up first, followed by all the liquor. Her stomach emptied in spasms of nausea, and long after the last of it had poured forth, she continued to kneel there, her body clenched and heaving, her mouth drawn back over her teeth, her face streaked with tears.
When she could stand up again, she ran some water into the sink and washed her face with soap. Her careful make-up job disintegrated, but she didn't care about that. She scrubbed her face furiously, trying to rub off a sensation of filth which clung to her mouth and jaw.
She dried her face on a towel. It smelled of his after-shave lotion, and that nearly made her sick again. She dreaded having to return to the bedroom, but her clothes were still in there, and she had no choice.
She left the bedroom and walked naked down the hall. He was still lying where he had fallen. She forced herself to look at him, and began to wonder if he were dead. Then she saw his head roll on the floor and heard him make a sighing sound in his throat.
She pulled on her clothing quickly, not caring how the carefully-chosen clothes fit her as long as they covered her flesh. She stuck her garter-belt in her purse and left her nylons where they were. She turned to leave the room.
At the door, she stopped and looked back at him. He was regaining consciousness. His face was beginning to twist in pain, and his hands were moving at his sides.
She looked at him coldly. All the strength had gone from him, and his passion had dwindled ridiculously.
"You pig," she said, her voice tensed. "You filthy pig! I should have known better...." She paused, and sucked in a trembling breath. "Men are pigs!"
She left the apartment without waiting to see if he'd heard her.
It was still early evening, but there were no cabs anywhere in sight on the street. She began walking stiffly toward the nearest major avenue, ignoring the rumblings of nausea, hardly aware of the chill fall wind blowing against her bare legs. She emptied her mind deliberately, and kept it that way, not wanting to think about what had happened until she was safely home in her own apartment.
After walking a few blocks, she spied a cab and hailed it. The ride home was a long one-Jack's place was in the Eighties, and the apartment she shared with Dana was below Fourteenth Street, just east of Greenwich Village. When the driver pulled up in front of her door, the meter had clocked a fare of three and a half dollars.
She gave the driver a five-dollar bill and told him to keep it.
Linda's apartment was on the third floor of a renovated brownstone, a building which had begun life seventy-five years before in the height of style, had gradually decayed into a relic, and then been reclaimed, refinished, rescued from the brink of demolition. It was still far from a perfect building, but it had a coziness which most of the newer apartments lacked-a feeling of being enclosed from the world by a shell of years, as if the old walls had thickened, layer by layer, with the passage of time.
Linda was suddenly very glad she lived in such a building. Isolation from reality was exactly what she needed at that moment.
She unlocked the vestibule door, closed it behind her, and began climbing the steps to the third floor. The climb was a long one, but she didn't mind it. A physical effort of that sort made the forgetting easier.
She came to the third landing and turned down the hall to her door. After some fumbling in her purse, she found the key, and let herself into the apartment. The living room was dark and empty.
She was grateful that Dana wasn't around. The women would be sure to detect something in Linda's face and start asking questions, and Linda was in no mood to talk to anyone.
It didn't occur to her to wonder where Dana might be.
The apartment had a total of four rooms: two bedrooms of equal size, one large living room, and a standard kitchen. Linda went from the living room into the short hall which led to the bedrooms and the bath. Dana's door was closed as she passed it.
It didn't occur to her to wonder why that was.
She went into her own room, and stripped off her clothing. She felt a terrible need to take a shower, although her problem was more mental than physical. Naked, her breasts bouncing, she went to her closet, got down a sheer robe, and put it on. It did nothing whatever to conceal her lovely flesh.
It didn't occur to her that concealment might be necessary.
She left the bedroom and headed toward the bath. Her steps took her past Dana's room again, and one of her wrists unexpectedly brushed the doorknob.
The door swung open.
Linda stopped in the hall and backed up a few steps until she could see into the room. There was a light burning in there, a table lamp which lit the room thoroughly, but it still took several moments for the scene beyond Dana's door to register on her.
Dana was in there with one of her friends. Linda couldn't tell which friend it was, because she couldn't see her face. She couldn't see Dana's face either, but she recognized the body.
They were both naked.
CHAPTER THREE
He left the subway and climbed up to the street.
He began walking quickly toward his apartment.
Both hands were occupied now; one still holding the folded newspaper, the other pressing against his topcoat pocket, holding the package of photographs possessively against his thigh. He was plagued by the irrational thought that the bulge of the package might be noticed by a passerby, that the very shape of it in his pocket might somehow reveal its nature. He knew this was nonsense, but he could no more control the fear than he could control his growing lusts.
Those lusts by now had reached the point where they seemed to have a life of their own. They tore at the soft stuff of his abdomen with fangs and claws, ripping into him painfully as if he had swallowed a live rat. Satisfaction of the hunger was no longer just an emotional necessity; it was a requirement of survival of his physical body and his sanity as well.
He reached his apartment building at last and bolted up the steps to the vestibule door. He lunged into the inner hall, and caught the door behind him just in time to keep it from slamming.
The last barricade was facing him now-the walk down the hall, up the stairs, along the third floor corridor to his apartment. If he followed his natural instincts and broke into a run, he would attract attention to himself.
And he couldn't allow that to happen.
Not again.
Breathing deeply, fighting the tremor in his fingers and limbs, he went to the base of the stairs and began to climb. At the second floor, he paused on the landing. The doors along the hall were closed. From beyond them came the faint sound of television and talk.
He went down the corridor, turned, and started up the stairs to the third floor. His heart was leaping in his chest. His brow was wet again, more moist now than it had been back at the book store when the hand of the proprietor on his shoulder had wrenched him out of his dream of the past. The hunger blurred his vision, made it difficult for him to maneuver, and he stumbled against the top step, falling forward on one knee. The newspaper skidded out of his grasp as he put a hand out to steady himself.
He was on his feet again in an instant. He whipped the paper from the floor and brought it into position quickly. His free hand felt down the side of his coat, to the pocket, and located the package of photographs.
Reassured, he turned toward his apartment door.
A door into another apartment opened suddenly, and a woman peered out at him.
"Oh," she said. "It's you, Mr. Thornton."
He stopped. His fingers curled against the newspaper. He could feel the shielding caress of the paper against himself, even through the cloth layers of topcoat, trousers, undershorts.
The woman was looking at him oddly, and he realized his silence had grown too long. He must say something to her, if only to break the tension of the moment.
He wet his lips.
"Good evening, Miss Gaynor. I was just going to my apartment." His voice was unsteady, but not too noticeably so.
"I heard a noise," the woman said. "Something fell."
"I stumbled." He gestured at the landing. "Tripped over the top step."
"Oh. Didn't hurt yourself, I hope."
"No." He fabricated a smile. "Thank you."
She folded her arms and leaned against the door frame, and he realized sickly that she was settling down for a protracted conversation. The last thing he needed or wanted was to talk with anyone, especially Miss Gaynor.
She had been a trial to him in the past. Her apartment was just a few doors from his own, and she was the kind of woman who loved to leave her door ajar, loved to keep watch on the corridor so she could participate in the affairs of the others living on the third floor. She was about forty years old, slimly built, with a narrow waist, faintly-veined legs, and a surprisingly rounded set of breasts. She seemed to be always wearing faded housecoats, which did nothing for her figure except show it off.
"I was looking at TV," she said pleasantly. "There's this show on about kids. Kind of interesting. You don't have a TV, do you?"
"No." He blinked a droplet of sweat from the corner of his eye. "Kids?"
"Yeah. JD's, like. Only real young. Disturbed kids. There's this egghead clinic takes care of them, and that's what the show's about."
"I see. That must be very interesting." He began to edge past her door.
"It is." She giggled. "There was a dirty part before. Really surprised me."
He forced himself to meet her eyes. "A dirty part?"
"Yeah-you know. About sex. What these crazy little kids do with each other. And with themselves. You know what I mean."
His face felt as if it were about to crack from the effort of keeping it expressionless. "Ah-of course."
"Never saw nothing like that on TV before," she said. " 'Course, they didn't show nothing, or even come right out and say it, but I could tell what they were talking about. It's sad, ain't it?"
"What is?"
"Little kids sick in the head like that. I mean, sick enough to do things like that." She grinned suddenly and hitched her arms up under her breasts, making the shapes of them rise against her housecoat. She didn't seem to be wearing a brassiere.
He tried to concentrate on her face, but all he could see were her breasts.
"Yes," he said. "It's sad."
"I guess they'll be all right when they grow up, though. Like, when they're old enough to go to a woman. That'll cure them."
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
"It's a real interesting show," she said again. "It's still on."
"Yes. Well, don't let me keep you from it." He moved past her door.
Her eyes followed him. "You wouldn't want to step in and watch the end of it with me, would you? I mean, you don't have no TV, and all, so maybe you'd enjoy seeing it. With me."
The arms shifted again. The breasts shifted suggestively with them.
"No. I'm afraid I can't. I have some work to do this evening."
"Is that right?" Her face fell. "Too bad. Accounting stuff again?"
"Yes. I have to go over some figures." He thought of the photos in his pocket, but somehow the pun didn't seem funny at all.
"Well," she said, straightening up and putting her hand on the doorknob. "Maybe next time."
"Yes. It's good of you to invite me. Perhaps if I have an evening free...."
"I'm right down the hall here," she said archly. "Any time, Mr. Thornton."
"Thank you." He ignored the coloration of her voice.
"See you." She stepped back into the apartment. As she turned, the bodice of the sleeveless housedress hung away from her, creating a momentary opening at the shoulder. He caught a brief glimpse of her unbound breasts, swaying against the cloth.
Then the door was closed, and the vision was ended.
He turned, biting back a whining sound in his throat, and half-trotted to the door of his apartment. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and unbuttoned the topcoat, keeping his body close to the door in case anyone was watching. He fumbled his keys out of a trouser pocket, unlocked the door, and stumbled inside. He set the inner chain-lock before turning on the lights.
His apartment was a small one. The living room, dinette, and kitchen blended into one another, with only a shallow arch separating them. There were two doors in the left-hand wall, one opening into the bath, the other into his narrow bedroom.
He dropped the newspaper by the door and hurried along the wall to the bedroom. The room's single large window overlooked an inner court; light from the rear windows of the building opposite spilled into the room. He went straight to the window and drew the shade. It was opaque black, and could even shut out sunlight completely when necessary.
He crossed to his bed and lit the lamp on the end-table.
The walls of the room were papered with photographs.
They were mostly photos of women, cut carefully from magazines and mounted in groups. Some were naked, some wore the black-lace strappings of improbable underwear, some wore nothing but spike-heeled shoes. A few of the women were bound in ropes or chains.
He didn't look at them. He had seen the photos too many times for there to be any impact left in them. They were on the walls merely to give the room atmosphere. One of his most persistent fantasies was that the women in those photos watched him while he was in this room, observed his deeds and the solitary satisfaction of his personal lusts, and the sight of it excited them, and they yearned with a trembling ache to step down from their photos, become real women, and go to him, bring their lusts and their bodies to him, kiss him, tease him, use all the power of his passion to satisfy their own. They burned to do this, but could not because they were trapped in the photographs. They could only watch him, long for him, suffering the deep pain of desire forever aroused and never sated.
The women on the walls watched him in silent suffering.
Their pain fed his pleasure.
He pulled the package out of his topcoat pocket and held it momentarily in his hands. It took a colossal effort of will to refrain from tearing open the package and examining its contents, but he managed. As terrible as the bloat of want was for him, he knew the pleasure of release would be far better if he waited until things were properly arranged, until he was comfortable, until all the elements in the elaborate ritual of delight had been set in place.
He tossed the unopened package on the bed. He went to an easy chair in the corner of the room, took off his coat and jacket, then began unbuttoning his shirt. It was difficult, because of the trembling of his fingers, but at length the shirt came off. And then the undershirt, and the trousers, the shoes and socks and the small garters, which had left red welts in the flesh of his pale calves.
And finally the shorts.
His excitement was unbound at last. And he moved toward the bed, because he knew he would be more comfortable lying down.
Naked, he allowed the forces of desire to draw him across the room.
The photos on the walls watched him-a small man, narrow-chested, white, balding.
His bed was still rumpled from that morning. He pulled the covers down into a bunch at the foot of the bed, then sat down on the edge of it beside the package of photographs. He moved the night table out from the wall slightly, being careful not to disturb the lamp. Then he opened a drawer in the table and took out a folding wire stand of the sort stenographers use to prop up shorthand notes while typing. He set the wire easel precisely on the near edge of the table, pulled the lamp up behind it until the light was directly above it.
Everything was ready.
He picked up the package and laid it on his bare legs. It was wrapped in brown paper and glued with tape at the flaps. He slit the tape with a thumbnail, running his finger down the length of the package.
The paper opened.
The glossy surface of a photo caught the light.
He still didn't look into the package, although the waiting was becoming more of a torture every second. Instead, he grabbed the top of the stack of photos in his hand, and stripped away the remaining folds of paper. His fist crumpled the paper into a ball. He dropped it on the floor.
He turned, took the stack of photos in both hands, and squared it against the top of the night table. Then he set it in the easel. The photos leaned back at a shallow angle. The light from over the stand lit them well, but cast no reflections on the hard, glossy finish.
When he was satisfied that the photos were in position, he hitched his legs up onto the bed and inched up the sheets until his back was against the headboard. There was a pillow beside him; he picked it up and slipped it in behind his back. That done, he straightened his legs out on the bed, his feet apart.
He held off for just a moment longer.
Then he looked at the top photo. He had judged the angles correctly; he hardly had to turn his head to see it.
A girl.
And a man.
The girl was naked. Utterly, totally, incredibly naked. Her body gleamed with perspiration, with glistening highlights that accentuated every curve, swell, dip of flesh. No woman's body had ever been more completely revealed.
She was on a framework of wooden boards, lying backward at a forty-five degree angle. Her arms had been pulled up and out until her hands were above her head, then tied to the board at the wrists with loops of chain.
Her legs had also been affixed to the wooden frame with the same sort of chain.
The girl's body was white as snow. The tips of her breasts seemed almost black, like blisters of blood instead of nipples. The breasts themselves were large and shapely, needing no brassiere to emphasize their contours.
Her torso was slim. She was lying against the frame with her back arched, and her ribs were flared so tightly against her creamy skin that you could count them, one by one. Where the ribcage ended, her flesh dipped in a hollow down to the soft eye of her navel, then swelled gradually out to a tender waist.
Her legs were long, the calves smooth and rounded, without being heavy.
That was what the girl looked like, and his eyes devoured her. His mouth quivered at the edges, and his hands, which had been lying at either side of his hips on the bed came fluttering closer.
The man in the photo was also naked, except for one garment: a black hood with holes cut in it for the eyes. His body was powerful, tight with muscle, and also gleamed with perspiration. His face was concealed by the hood, but it was obvious that he was very excited.
He stood next to the rack on which the girl was bound. One of his hands was formed over her near breast. The tips of his fingers were digging into the soft flesh cruelly, making the nipple swell like a pebbled wound between his thumb and forefinger.
The man's other hand held a vicious leather whip.
The photographer had caught the moment in mid-stroke. The tip of the lash was curled in the air above the man's head, showing the arc in which his fist had struck down. The handle of the lash was held tightly in his fingers, and had just passed the girl's hip.
The lash had just bitten into her flesh.
A frozen moment-an instant of pain-the girl's body tensed and bowed with torment, her breast in the man's savage grip, her nerves howling with agony as the braided lash whipped against her....
He couldn't see the red welt which the lash would leave in her skin. The photo didn't show that.
But he knew it was there.
Only the first photo-there were more behind it, waiting to be examined, waiting to feed the fire inside him. But the fire was now a raging inferno, and he couldn't wait, he simply couldn't wait, not even an instant longer.
The scene in the photo enveloped him until it filled his entire field of vision, until he could see nothing but the white, straining body of the girl, so very white in contrast to the black discs of her nipples, the open, screaming cavern of her mouth, the black snake of the lash violating her flesh....
He whimpered.
His breath wheezed in his throat as his hands blurred to a frenzy of motion. His bare feet twitched and skidded across the sheets, toes spreading and flexing.
He was the man.
His hand held the whip.
His eyes looked through the holes in that black mask, looked at the helpless nudity of that white, white girl.
His palm felt the thrust of her breast.
His ears heard the music of her screaming.
The fantasy swallowed him. With his fingers clutched desperately around the handle of the whip, he beat her, lashed her, his fist rising and falling furiously, his eyes glittering inside the black hood, seeing her torture, seeing the shuddering of her limbs, seeing the stripes laid into her flesh one by one as the passage of the whip left its mark.
Welts.
Red welts.
Perfectly parallel-and that was important for some reason-although the welts were a pleasure in themselves, there was so much more pleasure in their even spacing, their symmetrical banding of her lovely torso, right and perfect and exact, like bars....
The women on the wall watched him through to the finish, watched him until his whip-hand could do no more, watched as he shuddered with a tremor like death, froze for a mindless instant with eyes clenched shut and faqe contorted, then toppled, twitching, whimpering, sidelong onto the bed.
The room was silent. The bed, which had sung its protests under his motion, had bounded to a stop. Outside the black-shaded window, sounds of life drifted across the court-music, conversation, laughter.
Inside, the corpse of lust lay still in its soundless tomb.
He came to his senses after a long dark interlude, aware that quite a bit of time had passed. He lay motionelss and breathing for a while longer, then pushed himself erect. His elbows didn't want to lock, and he experienced some difficulty getting his body upright.
It was even harder for him to stand, but he got to his feet finally, and staggered across the silent bedroom, through the door, along the living room wall, and into the bathroom.
He ran water into the sink and waited, hands braced on the porcelain rim, until it was warm. Then he took a washrag from the towel rack, and did what had to be done.
He felt better after that, and although his legs were still a bit shaky he was able to return to the bedroom without lurching into anything. His heart was still pounding furiously, but it had been doing that more and more of late, and he'd grown to expect it.
The central core of his identity had been satisfied, and the shock waves would be radiating out through him for some minutes to come.
Satisfied.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. No-not satisfied. Quieted for the moment, only for the moment-but not satisfied. The hunger of lust could never be satisfied.
He looked at the photo propped on the night table.
Not that way, at any rate.
Oh, of course, he could relieve the pressures that way-by himself, alone with his photos and his fantasies. He could imagine himself right into the pictures sometimes, take on the identity of a man with a whip, a torturer of women-but that was only imagining. It wasn't real, and even if he succeeded in fooling himself at the time, even if he became so wrapped up in his dream that he could no longer distinguish it from reality, he would know afterward that it had all been hollow.
Relief, yes.
Satisfaction, no.
There had been satisfaction once. A long, long time before-so long ago that he could no longer remember the circumstances clearly. He could recall that there had been a girl, or maybe more than just one girl, maybe a number of girls. They all blended together in his mind until they were a single girl, a girl with no face he could remember and a composite body, made up of all the female bodies he had known. And he could also recall that he had been a young man then, the sort of young man who would think nothing of going into a cheap bar and picking up a hooker and paying for the use of her.
Best of all, he could remember the satisfaction itself. Not the process by which it had been achieved-just the satisfaction. The memory of that was strong in his mind, because it had been so remarkable, so complete and wonderful, so unlike any other pleasure he'd known.
There had been at least one girl. And he'd done something to her.
And he'd been satisfied.
But satisfaction had its price, because it was after the satisfaction that people started to notice him.
He passed a hand over his brow. He couldn't remember that part either. He knew that the people who noticed him had posed a threat, that he had been aware of their interest in him and had tried to run from it, and that they had caught him finally, run him to ground like a fugitive.
And then....
Red welts.
Or was that before? Were the welts a cause of his satisfaction, or an effect? Or both?
He imply couldn't remember.
At any rate, it had all been a long time ago, and memories didn't mean anything. The satisfaction, however he'd found it, was out of his reach now, and he was forced to settle for what he had.
Packages of photographs, for instance. Dreams of domination, of mastery. And solitary ecstasy.
He looked at the photo of the masked man and the white, screaming woman. It had lost its magic for the moment, but he knew that would return eventually. Besides, there were other photos behind it which he hadn't even looked at yet. New photos, new dreams, new release.
He turned away from the photographs. After a moment, he got up and went across to the window. It was hot in the room, and his brow was wet with perspiration. A little fresh air would help him settle down.
He stepped up close to the wall in order to conceal his nakedness, then leaned over and raised the shade. He was about to lift the window a few inches and redraw the shade, when he saw something.
Something was happening in a window across the way. Something incredible. He couldn't believe his eyes.
He pulled the shade down flush with the windowsill, went quickly over to the night table, switched off the lamp, then padded through the darkness to the window. He raised the shade with trembling fingers, hoping he would see again what he had seen a moment before, hoping that it hadn't been a dream or an illusion.
It had been quite real. It was still there.
His eyes bugged from their sockets. Without his knowledge, his hand plunged to his legs.
Across the court, framed perfectly in a lighted window, was a bed.
On that bed were two naked girls.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lesbian. The word hung in Linda's mind, blocking out everything else.
But suddenly it was more than just a word, more than a concept to be pondered idly, more than a remote and improbable quirk of human behavior.
The word had become a reality.
Lesbian meant something real.
It meant what was happening on the bed.
The door to Dana's room was open only a few inches. It was dark in the corridor where Linda stood, and even if the girls on the bed had turned to look in her direction, it was un-likely they would have seen her. Neither of them seemed to have noticed the one clue to Linda's presence; the fact that the door had swung slightly ajar.
But that was understandable.
Their attentions seemed pretty well occupied.
The girl with Dana was built along similar lines; her body looked hard, and though her curves were very feminine, there was a firmness to them that was out of place. Because of the arrangement of their bodies and the tightness with which they clung to each other's flesh, Linda could see only the fringes of the stranger's anatomy. The nipples of her breasts were concealed, pressed snugly against Dana's waist, but the edges of the fleshy masses were visible, resilient and round.
Dana had her arms hooked behind the girl's knees.
Lesbian.
It was all so clear to Linda now-so obvious and inevitable. She felt like an idiot for not having seen it before. There had been clues all around her: Dana's choice of clothing, the odd hardness of her body and the pride she seemed to take in that, her choice of friends and the atmosphere generated in the apartment whenever they got together-it all added up to one inescapable fact.
Lesbian.
Of course Linda had sensed an electricity in the air whenever one of Dana's friends dropped over; she recognized it now as the familiar tension of lust. She hadn't felt it earlier because she had never imagined it could exist between two girls. And naturally she'd gotten the impression that Dana and her friends wanted her to leave the apartment on occasion because that had been precisely what they had wanted.
And now she knew what went on while she was out.
Lesbian.
Linda had heard of such things, but had never quite believed in their reality. Lesbianism had always seemed to her akin to insanity, which was something that happened only to strangers. She knew there were asylums filled with lunatics, but she'd never seen an asylum or met a lunatic, so the idea had always been an abstraction to her.
Until now.
She'd heard stories at work, too-stories about the strange, thin-boned, elegant women who made their living as fashion models. According to the gossip, quite a few of them preferred the company of their own sex when in the mood for pleasure. And though it was easy to believe almost anything about those hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed creatures, Linda had never managed to convince herself that such a perversion could actually exist. Until now.
She recalled an incident from her childhood. She'd been just twelve years old at the time, with a body that was already ripening into the first curves of womanhood. She'd gone to a theater-an unfamiliar one, outside her neighborhood. A grown woman had sat down next to her. Before she'd known what was happening, Linda had found the hands of the woman touching her, stroking her, caressing the budding forms of her breasts, her knee, inching beneath her skirt.
She'd run from the woman before anything further could happen, recalling her mother's warning to never let a stranger touch her in such a fashion. It was long afterward that she realized her mother had spoken only to men, had never warned her against women. The incident had perplexed her, because she had been completely unable to understand it.
Until now.
Now, she understood everything. Now, as she watched, tensed and trembling in the hall, the idea of love-play between women was suddenly a truth, the proof right before her eyes, in the bedroom, in the bed, in the silent struggle of two naked female bodies.
Dana made a sound.
An instant later, the other girl made the same sort of sound-a bubbling that convulsed the naked flesh of them both.
The girl's fingers dug for an instant deeply into Dana's buttocks. Their bodies strained.
Then the girl subsided, and rolled slowly over onto the bed.
Dana's legs straightened on the sheets. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slack. The cones of her firm breasts rose and fell with her heavy breathing.
Next to her, the girl lay on her side, one arm pinned beneath her body, the other still flung out across Dana's waist. The girl's rosy-tipped breasts were squeezed between her upper-arms, bringing the nipples to within inches of each other.
Linda could now see the girl's face, and realized that she knew her after all. She couldn't remember the name, but the features were familiar, and so was the long, bright red hair. The color of that hair had startled Linda the first time she'd seen the girl.
A stranger, Linda thought, someone she hardly knew-a Lesbian, lying shuddering on a bed with all her secrets exposed.
Linda knew she should stop watching. The Tightness or wrongness of what had transpired between Dana and the redhead had nothing to do with it; the fact of their privacy was the important thing. Linda realized how she would feel if someone were to watch her while she and a man enjoyed each other's attentions. She realized also that there were probably just as many people in the world who would condemn her for loving a man who was not her husband as there were people ready to denounce Dana and the redhead for perversion.
No matter what form it took, that should be a private thing, up to the individual entirely.
Linda knew all this.
But she didn't stop watching.
She couldn't.
Something about the scene held her eyes riveted. It was fascinating, but not in a repulsive way as a gory accident might be fascinating. Linda was shocked, but not at all repelled. Looking at those two naked girls, and realizing what they had just done, Linda felt the warmth of something new and nameless inside her. Dana stirred.
Her head rolled on the sheets, turning to face away from the nude form of her lover and toward the door. She opened her eyes.
Linda tensed, not wanting to run, wanting to stay and see everything that happened, but aware of how embarrassing it would be if Dana noticed her standing there.
Dana didn't notice her.
Perhaps the fact that the hall was dark and the room was lit helped conceal Linda's presence. Or perhaps it was simply that Dana's eyes were still congested with lust. Whatever the reason, Dana looked right at Linda and didn't seem to notice her at all.
Linda waited.
After a moment, Dana rolled her head over onto the opposite cheek. She lifted her face and kissed the girl.
The girl stirred, and opened her eyes.
Neither of them did or said anything for several seconds. Then the redhead pushed herself erect on the bed. She hitched her body around until she was facing Dana, folded her legs under her, Indian-style and leaned forward, smiling. Her pretty breasts hung slightly away from her body.
Linda could see the girl's nipples now. They were small and tight, hardly any larger than dimes. They looked, to Linda, a little bit like a man.
Now why, she wondered, did that idea seem suddenly so appealing?
The redhead spoke. "Wow," she said.
Dana grinned up at her. "You like?"
"I like. I always like. With you, anyway."
"I'll bet you say that to all the girls."
The redhead laughed. "No bet. Because I do. But this time I mean it. You're a winner, Dana."
"You're pretty good yourself."
"We're good together. That's all." The redhead lifted her face and looked around. "Where the hell are the cigarettes? I had a pack."
"On the table there," Dana said, nodding at a night-stand. "Light one for me."
The redhead shook two cigarettes out of the pack, stuck them both in her mouth, and lit them, then handed one to Dana. They smoked for a few moments in silence.
The redhead laughed abruptly. "You know something? I'm still shakey."
"So am I," Dana replied. "A girl doesn't recover from a bash like that in five minutes. It takes a while."
The redhead puffed her cigarette. "Not too long, I hope."
"How so?"
"I want more." She paused and wriggled her shoulders, making her breasts dance between her arms. "Don't you?"
"Yes," said Dana. "But let's finish our cigarettes first."
"I wish we could spend the whole night."
"It would be nice. But we can't."
"What time's your roommate coming home?" Dana shrugged. "Probably after midnight. She's out with a boy friend somewhere getting loved."
"Oh? She tell you that?" .
"Uh-uh. We never talk about sex. But I can tell when she's planning to please some guy."
"I don't get it. How?"
"The way she acts." Dana chuckled. "It shows in her face. I saw it this morning when she told me she had plans for tonight. And this afternoon, when we quit work, it was written all over her. She gets worked up thinking about it, I guess. Her eyes get bright. Her mouth hangs open when she thinks you're not looking at her-like that.
"And it doesn't bother you?" asked the redhead.
"What doesn't bother me?"
"Knowing she's all ready to go? Don't you get the itch when you see that?"
Dana snorted. "Hell, no. Not for a gal like Linda-not when there are pretty toys like you available."
"Crud," said the redhead, laughing. "Now I'm the one who's getting snowed."
"No, I'm serious."
"I don't believe you. After all, it isn't as if that Linda was some kind of pig, or anything. She's a real good-looking girl. Maybe you won't admit it, but I wouldn't mind loving her myself."
"She wouldn't go," Dana said. "She's straight."
"You know that for a fact?"
"Absolutely. I've put out feelers a couple of times, just to see what would happen. She and I spend evenings alone here once in a while, so I've had opportunities to test her, see how she'd react."
"What do you mean, test her?"
"Well-strip, for instance. I did that once. Told her I was going to take a shower, came in here and peeled right down to the skin, then walked back into the living room to ask her a question or something-I forget what. Anyway, I let her get a good long look at me."
The redhead nodded. "And?"
"Nothing. Not a twitch. She looked me over once, the way anybody would, then kept her eyes on my face and never looked again."
"Boy," said the redhead. "I'd never manage that."
"There were other times, too," Dana went on. "We were in the kitchen once, making dinner together, standing right next to each other by the stove. I had to reach around her to get stuff out of the refrigerator, and every time I did, I made sure she got a boob up against her arm. I wasn't even wearing a bra that night, so I know she could really feel it."
"And that didn't do anything to her, either?"
"Not a thing," said Dana. "I might as well have had baseballs inside my blouse for all the reaction I got."
The girl shook her head. "Some cold fish."
"I don't know about that," said Dana. "Sometimes, I think she's frigid as an iceberg-and then I see how she gets when she's thinking about going out with her boy friend, and I'm not so sure."
"How do you know she lets her boy friend have her? Maybe they just go to the movies, or something."
Dana grinned suddenly. "Well-you've seen her often enough. If you were a man, would you keep taking her out and paying her way unless you were? Would you be able to stand keeping hands off all that joy?"
"No, I guess not. You made your point." Dana dragged deeply on her cigarette. "You know what I think?"
"What?"
"I think the idea of loving a woman never even crossed her mind."
"Oh, come on. She's over twenty-one, isn't she? She must have heard of Lesbians before."
"Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But I don't know. I just don't know."
The redhead tilted her face to one side and examined Dana with a curious expression. "Maybe I'm imagining things, sweetheart-but I get the impression that you want Linda."
Dana blinked. "That could be. Then again, it might be that she bothers me because I can't understand her."
"Would you go to bed with her if you had the chance?" asked the redhead.
"I couldn't say. I can't imagine ever having that chance."
"But suppose you did," the redhead persisted. "Suppose, all of a sudden, you found out that Linda knew about Lesbians, knew you were that kind of woman. Suppose the secret got out."
"Suppose it did. So what?"
"Would you make a pass at her?"
"I might."
The redhead nodded. "Then you should."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"If you'd take a stab at getting her into the sack once your secret was out, then you ought to blow the whistle on yourself, and do it."
"Why in hell should I? A thing like that-she'd probably scream and run like a virgin in an Army barracks."
"Could be," said the redhead. "On the other hand, she might hop right into bed. You never know."
"True," Dana took a last puff on her cigarette, then reached past the redhead and stamped it out. "But I doubt if she'd go along."
"You can't be sure of that until you try her. And you really ought to try her, Dana. Living with a pretty one like that-looking at her and wondering about her-it's no damned good. It can eat you alive."
"No, it can't," said Dana, with a grin. "Huh?"
"Not as long as you are."
A slumberous smile grew across the redhead's face. "You ready for more?"
"What do you think?"
"I think you're ready. And I'll tell you something else-I think I'm ready, too."
Dana reached up a hand and slipped her fingers under one of the redhead's dangling breasts. "Why don't you put out that cigarette," she said.
The redhead put out her cigarette.
She leaned forward, put her hands on the bed, then unfolded her legs until she was kneeling. Her face was hovering right over Dana's.
Their mouths opened. Then their lips sealed in a frantic kiss.
In the hallway, Linda felt a shudder inside her.
The redhead had lifted a hand to palm one of Dana's hard breasts, and was working the mound tightly against her ribcage, manipulating it like a wad of dough. Dana's arms fluttered up around the girl's shoulders.
In the hallway, Linda's breathing increased its rhythm.
The redhead tore her lips away from Dana's with a smack, then dropped her kiss to the pulsing column of her throat. Slowly, inch by inch, she worked her mouth along.
Dana shuddered. Her mouth hung slackly open.
In the hallway, Linda's mouth also hung open.
The redhead's kiss was now mounting the first rise of Dana's right breast. Her lips worked expertly as she neared the tightening blossom of the nipple. Her hand scooped around to the side of Dana's breast, cupping it toward her, causing it to rise tensely like a creamy hill with a tiny coral sculpture at its peak.
Dana shuddered.
So did Linda.
The redhead's kiss moved again, and began to circle Dana's nipple, touching the pebbled aureole. Her touch left a trail of sensation all around the nipple, while her curled fingers squeezed the breast-flesh gently.
Dana made a low moaning sound.
It was all Linda could do to keep making that same sound herself.
The redhead's mouth lifted, and hung for a moment directly at the angry red cap of Dana's breast. Her fingers gripped deep, the nipple swelled suddenly upward, her kiss struck.
Dana arched her body, digging her heels and the back of her head into the mattress, forcing her breast against the redhead. Her eyes were clamped shut, her lips were drawn back to show her teeth, her breath hissed in and out of her mouth frantically.
In the hallway, Linda's breathing kept pace with Dana's.
The two girls on the bed began in earnest. The redhead's-kiss switched from one breast to the other, her hands mauling the mounds almost flat. Dana had brought her arms underneath the redhead and now had twin handfuls of the girl's breasts. She touched them, running her fingers around their pendant contours, then cupped her palms and pushed with enough force to make the yielding flesh spill in ridges from between her fingers.
The redhead shifted around on the bed. The redhead's lovely breasts were invitingly near Dana's face.
Dana accepted the invitation.
In the hallway, Linda's hands were busy with her own breasts. She wasn't even aware of it.
The redhead began to move, drifting along Dana's torso, leaving little lip-circles along the ribs. Dana was doing the same thing.
Linda felt a spasm shake her limbs, and put a hand against the wall to steady herself. The other hand was still inside her negligee, still caressing her aching breast.
And still the redhead's mouth moved, like a snail slowly coursing over Dana's naked flesh, kissing everything in its path. Across the vibrant plane of Dana's stomach. Slowly, the kissing lips began to climb the upraised column of one leg.
Linda whimpered, but it was a small sound, and no one heard it but herself.
The hands of the redhead lifted, touched the backs of Dana's knees, then slid along the legs and under to clutch the taut mounds of the buttocks.
Dana's hands echoed her emotion, imitated each caress exactly; the redhead's bottom was suddenly possessed in a two-handed grip.
Linda's free hand left her breasts, and vanished to her legs.
The redhead shifted. Her face came up and hung poised for a breathlessly lustful moment.
The girls fell together, violently, their hands at each other's buttocks, their breasts heaving.
Linda had never before heard a sound even remotely like that.
The sound of lust.
It battered against Linda's senses like detonations of thunder. She felt something start to happen, something eerie and awful, but at the same time more pleasurable than anything she could name.
She thought for a moment that the sensation was being produced by the sound.
Then she realized it was being produced by her own caress.
Her head came up, eyes widening in sudden horror, and she whipped her hand guiltily away from her flesh. She stood, staring wildly, for only an instant longer; then she whirled, and bolted down the hall to her room. Her bare feet made no sound on the carpet.
She came into the room and closed the door quietly behind her, leaning back against it, breathing heavily. Her negligee had come undone down the front, and parted to reveal the whole glowing length of her nude body.
Her flesh shone with perspiration; she didn't have to look at herself to know that. Nor was it necessary to look at her breasts to know that her nipples had ripened and were now standing rigid as tiny fingertips from the centers of the hemispheres.
She closed her eyes. Never in her life had she felt anything to equal the excitement boiling in her at that moment. The sensation was physical, she knew that-but it was so much more potent than what she found in the arms of a man that it seemed completely new.
But, after all, it was new.
She was feeling the Lesbian for the first time.
After a while, she opened her eyes and pushed herself away from the door. She crossed the room slowly, and sat down on the bed facing the open window. Her mind was too filled with thoughts to wonder whether anyone might be watching from across the way.
Lesbian, she thought.
The big secret was out. There was no longer any question of why Dana preferred to be alone with her girl friends, or why they acted so oddly together. Now Linda knew the source of her roommate's behavior, the reason for the strange tension she'd felt.
Dana was a Lesbian. The question had been answered. It was as simple as that.
So that left only one additional question:
What was Linda?
She had never had occasion to wonder about herself before. Life had always seemed so simple to her. She was a woman; the distinctive contours of her flesh made that fact obvious. She was a woman, and a woman was designed by nature to have a man. Of course, whether or not a woman allowed a man to share her was something she had to decide for herself-but it was that, or nothing. You either had a man, or you didn't have anyone at all.
Or so it had always seemed to Linda.
But now, she wasn't so sure.
Dana wasn't a stranger, a nut in a lunatic asylum somewhere, a remote and unreal person to whom impossible things happened. Dana was a girl she knew fairly well. She walked and talked and ate and drank and smoked cigarettes like any other girl, and if her manner was a bit masculine, there was nothing so very unusual about that. Linda had met other mannish females in the past. It was a common trait; so common, in fact, that one whole branch of the fashion industry was devoted to catering to it.
It had never crossed Linda's mind to suspect that a woman like that might be a Lesbian.
Now she was beginning to wonder if perhaps they were all Lesbians.
If a girl like Dana could be possessed of such a perversion and yet keep it hidden so well, then obviously you couldn't identify a Lesbian by the way they acted, the expressions on their faces, or anything as simple as that. The twist of personality which produced lesbianism in a woman must lie too deeply in the personality to reveal itself in any superficial fashion.
How deeply was that urge buried?
Deeply enough to prevent the Lesbian herself from being aware of it?
The unwelcome excitement hadn't left Linda yet; she could still feel it in the muscles of her knees, in the weighty teardrops of her breasts. And that excitement had been produced merely through watching the secret caresses of two Lesbians.
How big would the excitement be if Linda allowed herself to participate....
She leaned back, bracing her hands on the bed behind her, and closed her eyes again. The front of her negligee was open completely. Her breasts hung bared and rounded, framed by the lacy hem of the garment.
If someone had been looking through the window of Linda's room, he would have seen as much of her as it was possible to see-he would have seen everything, completely, utterly, totally.
And someone was.
CHAPTER FIVE
He saw it all.
The girls across the way.
Lesbians.
He'd never dreamed girls like that lived in the building opposite his apartment. He'd spent some time in the past watching the windows across the court, on nights when there had been nothing more exciting for him to do, and had been rewarded with occasional glimpses of women dressing or undressing, displaying their bodies to one degree or another, going about their private business apparently unaware that their unshaded windows invited an observer's eye. But he'd never seen any more than a man might see on a beach. The women would either leave their lighted rooms or draw the shades before removing their underthings.
From what he'd seen of the women across the way, he'd long ago decided that they were simply normal, average females with husbands or boy friends-nothing, at any rate, to get him excited.
He watched through the window, safe in the dark concealment of his bedroom. His hunger grew, was satisfied, then grew again, as the Lesbian performed for him.
They kissed, caressed each other. They twined their limbs, snuggled their breasts together. They did fantastic things, and did them wantonly, furiously, nakedly.
He was able to see it all from his window, every last bit of it.
Of course, they excited him.
They excited him so much that he forgot all about his fantasies, forgot about the man with the whip, and the white, screaming girl in the photo, forgot his dreams completely for the moment.
Reality was claiming all his attention.
The girls were going wild. They were kissing each other's breasts. With every caress, their excitement seemed to grow.
And so did his.
It had been many years since anything in the real world had caused such a response in him. His excitement seemed bottomless, incapable of even momentary satisfaction. He worked frantically, trying to calm his boiling lust, but no sooner had the terminal pleasure shaken him than the demand was building again, screaming soundlessly for more....
Lesbians.
That meant something to him, but he couldn't remember what. It was connected with the past-that remote time before his lusts had become solitary, before he had given up the use of women and settled for dreams instead.
Back there, along the track of time somewhere....
Before the welts.
Red welts.
He aimed his eyes straight across the court, firing them like missiles from the sockets of his skull, imagining himself through space, through that window, into that lighted room-until it seemed to him he was standing right beside their bed, standing and looking down at their weird Lesbian struggle.
A noise began somewhere at the base of his skull-a soft sound, like the perking of coffee in a pot.
He was in the room, they were there before him, and it wasn't a dream any more, he wasn't imagining his presence in the room-he was there, in the flesh, with all his lusts howling for fulfillment.
He moved toward them. They didn't notice him.
It was time to do something.
He had done it before, a long time ago, and it had brought him total satisfaction, pleasure so huge it had been beyond pleasure-so long ago that he couldn't recall exactly how it happened, couldn't recall anything but the pleasure, the fantastic, consuming pleasure....
And the red, red welts, like the bars of a cage, smeared with blood.
And now it was going to happen again, because the Lesbians were loving each other, because he was there in the room, watching them, within reach of them....
It was going to happen again.
The perking liquid in his brain grew darker; it seemed to burst in droplets across the roof of his skull, then drool down over his mind, drowning thought, drowning everything but lust.
It was going to happen, because he was there ... because they were Lesbians....
There, he thought, they're moving. Shall I wait? If I wait a moment or two, they might move apart. Shall I wait for that?
There. The red-haired one is moving her head. She's digging her fingers into the other's bottom. She's making marks....
Welts.
And the other one is doing the same. She's not holding the redhead's bottom any more-she's got her hands up around the girl's waist, and she's raking her skin with her fingernails....
Welts.
Tracks of reddened pain, perfectly parallel, and that makes a difference, doesn't it ... the welts should be perfectly parallel, that's terribly important, although I can't think why ... it's part of that thing that happened so many years ago, the wonderful thing that happened when I found out exactly what I needed, and did it....
His hand was busy.
The girls paused, gasping and sighing, for the space of several heartbeats, then fell away from each other.
But they were Lesbians. And that meant something.
The noise in his skull shot upward in a final spurt, drenching the sphere of his brain in redness, red as blood, as bars, as welts....
He moved to do what had to be done.
And suddenly, the dream was ended.
He was in his own room, not theirs. And he was alone. And his hand knew nothing but abused desire.
Across the way, the two Lesbians were sprawled senseless on the bed, their bodies breathing, their limbs jerking as the last spasms of satisfaction contorted their muscles. They were both lying on their backs, so he could no longer see the welts.
He felt droplets of moisture coursing down his chest, and realized he was soaked with sweat. His entire body was sore; the muscles of his legs felt stiff and pulled, as if he had been climbing an endless flight of stairs.
He examined himself, trembling, appalled at the condition of his body, then glanced again across the court.
The girls were still there. They hadn't moved.
But the excitement was gone.
What ever it was that had brought him to such a peak of mindless lust had evaporated.
He staggered away from the window and went to the bathroom. The ache in his limbs was intolerable, the hammering of his heart threatened to shatter his rib-cage. He ran hot water into his bathtub and sat numbly on the rim until it was deep enough to hold him. He settled down into the steaming water and closed his eyes.
His brain felt sucked dry. He tried to think, but thoughts refused to come. He concentrated on the emptiness of his mind, forcing the thoughts to piece themselves together again.
What had happened to him?
The evening had begun as an ordinary one, as a safe one. He'd gone to his favorite bookshop, nursing the awful pang of his desire, and purchased what he needed. He'd been safe in the crowds going up and coming back, and the only problem he'd faced was the brief conversation with Miss Gaynor down the hall, but even that hadn't really amounted to anything.
And then, he'd been alone in his own apartment, alone with his excitement and his pictures. And safe.
Safe ... but from what? There wasn't anything threatening him. Was there? Why did that word keep popping into his mind? Where was the danger?
He didn't know. The answer to that question was buried far too deeply in his brain. He knew only that it was part of the larger pattern of motivation which he couldn't understand, that it had its roots back in the days before solitude, the days when he had known women, the time of the red welts....
He had come home, bolted the door, removed his clothes, unwrapped his photos, claimed his release, and been safe. Nothing very unusual about that. He spent many evenings that way.
And then, without any warning, there had been the window. And the Lesbians.
And suddenly he wasn't safe any more.
He couldn't remember clearly what had happened to him while he watched that window. A pressure had been born, something bigger than lust or excitement. It was related in some way to events in his past, those events which he could never recall clearly.
The Lesbians-that was one element.
The welts-that was another.
And he'd dreamed, while watching them, that he was in their room, standing only a few feet from their straining bodies, watching his hand....
Bands of red. Bars. Welts.
He opened his eyes. The coilings of memory shifted like smoke, then dissipated, and the whole train of thought vanished from his mind. The image of the two Lesbians enjoying each other still lingered behind his eyes, and the ghost of his uncontrollable excitement remained printed on his abraded flesh-but the gates of memory had closed for him.
The past was dead again.
And he was safe.
He remained in the bathtub only a while longer. When he climbed out of it and dried himself, he noted with satisfaction that the quivering of his limbs had finally stopped. He felt empty and a bit weak, but otherwise fine.
He went from the bathroom back into his bedroom. The shade was still up. He could see the lighted rectangles of the building across the way.
He stood for a moment in the darkness, wondering if he should risk another look. The two Lesbians had obviously satisfied each other before, but that didn't necessarily mean they were through for the night. There might be a great deal left to see if he cared to watch.
He wasn't sure he did. He was safe now, but would the safety last if he allowed his mind to be drawn across the court? He thought not.
Something....
Yes, that was it: something was out to get him, something terrible, something cruel. It had started its campaign against him earlier that evening, in the bookshop, while he waited, dreaming of the past, for the store to clear. It had put out its claws for him, and it might have reached him if the proprietor hadn't drawn him out of his reverie.
That had been a dangerous moment.
But the time he'd spent staring at the Lesbians had been a much more dangerous moment. It chilled him just to think of it. There, in front of that window, his senses filled with the exotic tableau opposite, the thing-whatever it was-had damned near claimed him. It had come so close, he'd been able to feel the hot breath of it blowing through his mind.
But it hadn't gotten him. Not quite. Something had happened-the dream had ruptured like a soap bubble, the red welts had vanished ... and just in time. The dream died, the danger passed over him, and he was safe again.
Did he dare go to the window and look through it now? Would it be wise to risk his safety?
No, it wouldn't be wise at all. But wisdom and lust have very little to do with each other, and he felt his instincts compelling him over to the window for another look, just one more look.
He looked.
The Lesbians had revived, and were busy again. The glutinous ticking inside his skull began anew. Lesbians....
What did that remind him of? Why did the fact that the girls were Lesbians seem so vital to him?
If the people across the way had been a man and a woman, indulging themselves in naked desire within view of his eyes, would his excitement be so enormous?
No. Such a sight would arouse him without question, but not to the degree he was now experiencing.
Suppose the people framed by that window had been the man and woman in the photo? Suppose the man had been standing in that room, holding a whip, lashing it across the girl's naked flesh again and again. And suppose the girl had been tied helplessly to the frame, her body white, her mouth screaming in a spasm of agony.
Just suppose that was the sight he saw in the window. How big would his excitement be then?
Tremendous. No doubt about that Big enough to drive him half out of his senses.
But not quite as big as this Lesbian excitement.
Seeing naked women excited him. That wasn't difficult to understand. And seeing the sort of activity which based its pleasure on pain-well, that would excite him terribly. There was no need to understand it. That was simply the way he was.
But this-the strange responses he felt while watching the Lesbians-this was all out of proportion to what he should be feeling. There was no reason for the sight of two girls loving each other to affect him so profoundly. At least, no reason he could explain.
And yet, there it was, perking away in the echoing darkness of his skull-the beginnings of a lust so intense it was an enemy, a lust with enough power to destroy him.
He wanted to tear his eyes away from the Lesbians. Safety was receding, danger was returning to claim him. In another few moments, he had the awful fear that he would lose control, that the nameless, menacing Something corked inside him would suddenly blossom forth, like a genie released from a bottle....
Yes, that was it exactly-just like a genie in a bottle. He was that bottle, and the genie was inside him, and the seal had been set on that bottle many years before, during the time of youth, and flesh, and red welts. The bottle had been corked, and had remained that way, stoppered and safe, all this time.
But now, the sight of the Lesbians was threatening to blow the bottle open, and release the monster.
His hand was busy again.
His breath seethed between his clenched teeth, because it was too much, because there had been too much lust, too much satisfaction, in too short a time. It was a pain to him now, and he wanted to stop, wanted to look away from the window and draw the shade and crawl into the dark safety of his solitary bed. He wanted terribly to stop, but it was too late; his eyes were glazing, his heart was driving up into his throat, his abdomen was coiling, and he couldn't stop, he just couldn't stop....
Then, something happened. In the window next to the one occupied by the Lesbians, he saw a motion, saw the pink of naked flesh out of the corner of his eye. His attention flickered away from the Lesbian window, and tried to focus on this new vision.
A girl.
She had just entered the room, and was standing with her back to the door, the front of her body facing the window. She was wearing a smoky gown of some kind, and even if it had been drawn across her, it would have done very little to conceal her.
But it was not drawn across her. It hung open, and all it concealed were her shoulders.
She was a blonde, the hair framed her face in soft waves. Her breasts were large, and hung with a fruit-like firmness from her upper torso. The nipples were small coins of excitement, very red in contrast to the creamy color of her skin.
She was beautiful.
He shuddered, and a whistling sound began in his throat.
The girl remained leaning against the door for several moments; then, she propelled herself away from it, and across the room to her bed. As she moved, her breasts swayed, beating softly together.
Her bed was set at right angles to the window, and when she seated herself on the edge of it, she was still facing him. She leaned back-a motion which made her lovely breasts tighten and rise-and relaxed.
The sound in his throat became louder.
She didn't do anything for quite some time. She simply sat there, her head thrown back. The cords of her throat throbbed to the rhythm of some secret, personal excitement.
He feasted his eyes on her. The Lesbians were forgotten in the wave of a new passion. His brutal caresses never stopped.
Blonde.
He remembered blondeness, remembered vividly how beautiful red welts could look on a blonde body, on the naked flesh of a blonde woman, a blonde Lesbian....
The genie inside him strained at its bonds.
She moved.
She bent her arms, let her body back on her elbows, held the position for a moment, then dropped flat on the bed. Her legs still hung over the edge of the mattress.
He was seeing her at a new angle now, seeing her pretty, naked calves dangling, not quite reaching the floor, seeing everything, facing him directly. And he could just make out her breasts as peaks of loveliness riding firmly on her rib-cage, tipped with stiff thrusts.
Blonde, beautiful, Lesbian, welts-it all meant something.
His fingers were numb. An ache was creeping up the muscle of his forearm. He didn't stop.
Then a hand appeared, cupped, fingers curled to contain one of her mounded breasts, and it was her own hand-she was holding one of her own breasts, caressing it, teasing herself into excitement.
It meant something. He had seen it before. Blonde ... Lesbian ... holding a globe just that way ... and one thing more ... one thing only remaining to make the picture complete....
She did it.
Her free hand moved like a spider, crawling on fingertips across the rounded waist, and down, down.
He gasped, a deep shuddering exhalation of air that tore up from his throat insanely. His intestines exploded into the rhythmic gallop of release.
The monster inside him came within an atom of escape.
Then that was over, and he fell to his knees in the darkened room, whimpering and drooling under the window like an infant.
Eventually, he found strength enough to pick himself up. He didn't look through his window again, because his eyes were no longer capable of seeing.
He moved with a zombie-stiffness across to his bed, flung himself upon it, and quivered off into unconsciousness.
And he dreamed.
He dreamed of a blonde he had known once. His conscious mind didn't remember her, but that portion of his brain which dreamed recalled her very well.
He dreamed also of Lesbians, blonde Lesbians, a blonde Lesbian alone on a bed, satisfying herself the only way she knew how.
He dreamed, too, of welts, red welts, bands and stripes and bars of red, some no thicker than a whip, some as thick through as his wrist. They wrapped him, bound him, hurt him fantastically, and he shrieked with pain in his dream.
The monster within him, the black, hideous genie of the bottle, stood poised on the brink of freedom.
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning, Linda was ashamed of herself.
She and Dana ate breakfast as usual in the kitchen together, but they hardly spoke. Dana seemed preoccupied with her own thoughts, just as Linda was, but it was doubtful that Dana felt anything to equal Linda's guilt .
There was no excuse for what she had done. It had been simple-minded, childish, dirty, contrary to everything she knew to be right. She should have outgrown such things ages ago, left them buried in the past with her adolescence.
Of course, she had been under a series of heavy pressures the evening before. First, the disgusting business with Jack and his revolting blunder, then the return home to the apartment and the fantastic scene in Dana's bedroom-these events had shaken her customary common sense. She'd been primed all that day for her interlude with Jack, and it had been quite a shock to have everything end like that. And on top of that, to learn in such a vivid and graphic way what her roommate did for entertainment-well, it had all been too much for her. The unsatisfied excitement she felt with Jack and had been fanned by the things she'd seen Dana doing with her redhead, and it had all combined to push her into doing something asinine by herself. But that didn't excuse her.
She and Dana finished breakfast, then went back to their rooms to dress. Linda avoided looking at her bed, not wanting to be reminded of what she'd done. But it was impossible to get the recollection out of her mind.
She had been excited. She had satisfied that excitement all by herself. It was a shameful thing, but it had happened, and there was no changing the fact now. Far more shameful was the fact that she'd been excited in the first place.
She thought back to Jack, and how he'd looked to her just before she left his place. All the charm of his hard, masculine body had been gone in that moment; the sight of him was even a bit disgusting. And she remembered calling him a pig, and meaning it with every fiber of her body.
Men are pigs....
That's what she said. And less than an hour after those words had left her mouth, she was back in her apartment watching two Lesbians indulging their perverted lusts, and feeling an excitement inside her so potent that she had to go to her bedroom and do something about it.
Weren't those the actions of a Lesbian?
She dressed numbly. Her hands were trembling; several times, she dropped bits of clothing on the floor. It seemed to take forever before she was ready to leave.
She went into the living room and found Dana waiting for her, sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette as calmly as if nothing whatever had happened the evening before. Once again, Linda was struck by the ease with which Dana kept her secret. No hint of it showed anywhere in her expression or her manner. Seeing her like that, could hardly convince herself that she had watched this same girl in the throes of naked, Lesbian lust.
Dana glanced up as she entered the room, and smiled.
"Ready, hon?"
Linda nodded. She tried to analyze the tone of Dana's voice, but her remark seemed innocent enough.
"Let's go then," Dana said. "We'll be late if we don't get moving."
They left the apartment together and went down the stairs to the street. It was a beautiful day. The sky was a rich blue, the sun was warm, the breeze had just a hint of fall in it. It was the sort of day that always made Linda feel very pleased with the world, but this morning it did nothing for her at all.
Dana didn't speak again until after they had reached the subway and climbed aboard. The ride uptown to the magazine offices where they worked was a short one, but it was long enough for Dana to open a conversation and get it rolling.
"Have a good time last night?" she asked.
Linda wet her lips. "Not bad. All right, I guess."
"Only all right, huh?" Dana smiled. "Your man didn't work out so well?"
Linda considered denying she had been out with a man, but the lie was pointless. She's heard Dana say last night that it showed in her face when she was planning a date. She wondered bleakly just how transparent she was to her roommate.
"He was all right," she said. "We simply didn't have much fun. Those things happen."
Dana nodded. 'True enough." She fell silent for a moment.
Linda glanced at her face. Dana was watching the flicker of lights from the tunnel, apparently hypnotized by them, but Linda got the impression that her pause was calculated, that she had a question of some sort ready to spring when she thought the moment was right.
Dana turned to look at her. "What time did you get in, hon?"
All at once, it hit her. She'd come back to the apartment last night without announcing herself. And after the activity in Dana's bedroom had proven too much for her, after she'd gone to her own room and done that terrible thing, she'd fallen asleep.
That meant Dana had still been unaware of her presence when the redhead left, and God only knew what time that was. It meant that Dana had probably come to her room and looked in and found her there asleep.
It meant that Dana had reason to suspect Linda had seen something.
She thought wildly of the redhead's remark-: that once Dana's secret was revealed, there would be nothing to prevent her from making a pass.
She couldn't let that happen.
"I got home around nine o'clock," she said. "I went straight to my room."
"Oh?" An alien expression passed across Dana's face. "How come you didn't look in on me?"
"I saw the door to your room was closed," Linda said quickly. "I figured you were asleep, or something. Anyway, I didn't want to disturb you. I was tired. I went straight to bed."
Dana's features were strangely taut. "You could have popped in to say hello. I wasn't sleeping."
Linda swallowed against the lump in her throat. The next logical step in the conversation was for her to ask Dana what she'd been doing in her room, but she was afraid Dana might answer with the truth. And that would bring the whole thing out into the open.
"I didn't feel very well," she said, sidestepping the fatal question. "I wasn't in a mood to talk or anything. All I wanted was to go to bed."
"Didn't feel well?" Dana repeated. "Was something wrong?"
"I'd rather not talk about it," said Linda.
"Was it your boy friend, hon?"
"Please, Dana-let's just forget about the whole thing, okay?"
Dana put a hand on her arm. Linda wanted desperately to move away from the contact. "All right, hon. Excuse me for asking. It's only that...."
"What?" Linda asked.
"Well, you're acting a little funny this morning, as if something terrible happened last night." The corners of her mouth lifted in a smile. "I only wondered if I could help."
Linda fought to keep her emotions under control. "It has nothing to do with you, Dana."
"Of course, it doesn't," she said, still smiling. "Why should it have anything to do with me?"
"Let's drop it, Dana. Please."
Dana's fingers moved subtly on her arm. "Okay, hon."
Before the conversation could resume on another topic, their station came roaring up at them out of the gloom, and the ride was ended. Linda stepped from the car with relief and let the mob swallow her. She and Dana became separated during the climb to the street, but Linda pretended not to notice this and went up the stairs as quickly as she could through the thick humanity. On the street, she paused and looked around once for effect, then went alone into her building. She imagined Dana would catch up with her before she could get upstairs to the safety of the office, but her luck held; there was an elevator cab waiting at the lobby, with room enough in it for just one more passenger.
The elevator whisked her up to her floor. She nodded a hello at the receptionist, signed the time sheet, then went straight to her desk.
Dana showed up a few minutes later. The wall clock read nine on the button, so there was no time for her to stop and speak with Linda. She waved a hand and smiled as she passed by, heading for her own desk. Linda nodded back.
The awful moment was ended. She hadn't revealed herself.
There was a pile of work waiting on her desk, and she plunged into it, submerging her mind in the familiar routine. As long as she kept busy, she wouldn't have to think about her problems or face Dana again until noon. If she worked it right, perhaps she could avoid Dana even during lunch hour.
And she wanted desperately to avoid Dana.
Why was that, she wondered? Was she afraid of the girl, afraid that Dana might make Lesbian advances toward her?
Yes-that was part of her fear. But only part.
Far more potent was the fear that she would accept such advances.
She bit hard into her lower lip until the pain cut across her thoughts, then ducked into her work before her worries could re-form. It wasn't easy, but gradually she managed to wipe her mind clear.
She was almost her normal, cheerful self again when the phone rang. She picked up the receiver absently, expecting to hear the voice of one of her co-workers.
"Linda Curtis," she said.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and in that silent space she suddenly knew who her caller was.
"Linda-this is Jack." She closed her eyes. "Can you hear me?" he asked. "I can hear you."
"Don't hang up, now. Linda? You're not going to hang up, are you?"
"What do you want, Jack?"
"To talk to you."
"We don't have anything to talk about."
"Yes, we do. We have quite a bit to talk about. Please, baby."
"Jack, I'm trying to work."
"I know, I'm at work myself. I don't have much time."
"Then say whatever it is you want to tell me."
"Not over the phone. That's no good. I have to see you." His voice sounded tired, and a bit scared.
"I don't want to see you, Jack."
"You've got to, Linda. Please. I need a chance to explain."
"Your explanations don't interest me."
"Please, baby. Don't be that way. Give me a break."
"A break?" She became aware that her voice had risen, and spoke her next words in a tense whisper. "You've already had a break from me. You've had everything from me you're going to get."
"You don't understand," he said sorrowfully.
"You bet your life I don't understand. And I doubt if anything you say is going to change that."
He paused again. She wondered if he were going to hang up.
Then he spoke. "You called me a pig last night," he said.
She stiffened with shock. She hadn't realized he'd been conscious enough to hear her parting words.
"You said I was a pig," he went on. "You said that all men were pigs."
"Well, what if I did," she said. "I think I had reason enough for saying that."
"No, you didn't. You have it all wrong. That's why I have to see you, talk to you."
I have it all wrong, she thought. The truth of that remark struck her squarely between the eyes. The thing which had happened between her and Jack the night before wasn't nearly as significant as what took place later-that was the wrong part. The sights she had seen and the lusts she had felt had pushed her to the brink of something new and frightening, something she couldn't cope with at all. She had run from Jack's embrace into another world, and now he was trying to call her back.
Did she want to be called back?
If she hung up on him now, cut him out of her life completely, how long could she continue to live with Dana before the Lesbian madness became too much for her? Without the release Jack could provide, wouldn't her lusts build up to the point where they'd have to be satisfied, the way they had last night? And wouldn't eagle-eyed Dana have to notice that eventually?
The idea of seeing Jack again wasn't a pleasant one, but she felt a sudden urge to give it a chance. If she could find any pleasure with Jack after the nauseating thing he'd done to her, if the company of such a man could still entertain her, then maybe there was some hope after all.
Maybe the excitements she'd felt had been only isolated phenomena, and not part of a larger sickness inside her.
All at once, she had to know. She'd never be able to stay in the same room with Dana, or any other woman, until she was sure she was safe from herself.
"Linda? Are you still there?"
She sighed and wet her lips. "I'm still here."
"Will you give me a chance?"
"When?" she asked.
"Tonight," he said. "After work. Well have dinner."
"All right. It had better be good, Jack."
"I think I'll be able to make you understand, Linda. I'll sure try."
"Well see."
"Wait outside your building for me. m pick you up. I'm bringing the car."
"The car? What for?"
"I'll explain when I see you. And Linda...."
"Yes?"
"Thanks. Thanks for giving me a break." She couldn't think of an answer for that, so she hung up.
The rest of the morning passed swiftly. At noon, Dana appeared beside her desk and suggested that they lunch together. Linda invented the excuse that she wanted to go shopping for books, which was something Dana hated.
As they rode down in the elevator together, Dana asked how they had managed to become separated that morning, but Linda glossed it over.
They left the building, went their separate ways, and that was that.
Linda breathed a deep sigh of relief. She and Dana probably wouldn't see each other to talk for the entire rest of the day. From this point on, it was smooth sailing, with no worries about saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong expression, somehow giving Dana the edge she was no doubt waiting for. As the redhead had remarked, once Dana knew Linda was aware of her secret, she would have nothing to lose by making a pass. And Linda couldn't risk that until she was more certain of what was in her own mind.
Jack would help her find that out.
She returned to work after lunch, and settled down again into the routine. The hours passed without her awareness of them, and all at once it was five o'clock and quitting time.
She saw Dana at the elevator, told her she was going out for the evening, and pretended not to notice the puzzled expression on her roommate's face. Dana was obviously thinking about Linda a great deal; but she said nothing, and the moment of danger was past.
They separated in the lobby, Dana heading down the block toward the subway, Linda remaining just inside the doors. She watched the passing traffic, waiting for the sight of Jack's car. She wondered what he would look like to her, after all that had happened.
He pulled up outside her lobby before five-fifteen, and she was surprised to note that he didn't look any different to her at all. He merely looked like a man, an ordinary man.
Or was it that men in general looked different to her?
He leaned over and opened the door as she came across the sidewalk. "Hello," he said.
"Hello, Jack." She slid in beside him, being careful to keep her skirt pulled down around her knees. "Where are we going?"
"There's this restaurant near White Plains. It'll be just right."
"White Plains? All the way up there?"
He turned to look at her, but she glanced away, not wanting to meet his eyes.
"Have it your own way," she said.
He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
They didn't speak at all during the long drive up. Linda couldn't help thinking how unlike last night's taxi ride this was. They sat as far away from each other as the seat would permit, and she felt no urge to put her hands on him, or allow him to do so much as lay a finger on her. She wondered if she would ever feel that kind of excitement again.
They arrived at the restaurant around seven. It was a pretty place, a sort of lodge, perched on a crag above the Hudson River. The food was excellent, the wine even better, but none of it made any impression on Linda.
She waited patiently all through dinner for Jack's opening gambit. When it still hadn't come by the time dessert was served, she decided to begin the conversation herself.
"You were supposed to explain something to me," she said. "When is this big event going to take place?"
He smiled slightly and moved his fingers nervously around his coffee cup. "Not here," he said. "We'll go for a drive when we're finished, park somewhere. I want to talk to you in private."
Her mouth drew into a firm line. "If you're planning to make a pass...."
"Nothing like that. Honest to God, Linda-all I want to do is talk. Trust me."
"I don't know why I should. But all right." She drained her coffee. "Let's get going."
She waited by the door while he paid the check, then followed him out to the car. She sat stiffly all the way over against the door as he drove a few miles up the Hudson Palisades. The silence in the car was thick as fog.
At last he seemed to find a spot that satisfied him, and turned the car off the highway onto a dirt road. They bounced through some dense woods, and came finally into an open, grassy patch overlooking the river.
When he cut the engine, Lina could hear the ticking of crickets, and beyond the hood of the car she could make out the glitter of starlight on the water. It was a terrific place for a fellow and girl to be alone together, she thought, and even if his intentions posed no danger, she would have to be careful that the atmosphere didn't charm her into doing something stupid.
She realized she was feeling the beginnings of the standard urge, in spite of everything that had happened. She felt relieved; the Lesbian boogyman had not quite gotten her yet.
She hitched herself around on the seat and drew her knees up, tugging her skirt down so that her legs were concealed completely. She looked him in the eye.
"Well? Let's hear it."
He lit a cigarette, going through the ritual as slowly as he could, obviously stalling for time. She waited, and finally he spoke.
"I like you, Linda."
She snorted. "How flattering."
"I mean it. I really like you. There isn't a thing I wouldn't do for you."
"Right now, there isn't a thing you can do for me, except make your point and take me home."
He pursed his lips and looked out toward the river. "You're a very exciting woman, Linda. I guess you know that."
"I've heard," she said.
"When we're in bed together, it's like-well, it's better than any woman I've ever had in my life. And I've had quite a few, believe me."
"Tell me about them all some time. But not right now."
"With a woman like you," he went on slowly, "I'd do just about anything-anything at all. Anything you asked me to do. No matter what it was."
He fell silent, and sat smoking his cigarette without looking at her, as if he had just made some terribly important point. She frowned, puzzled.
"So you'd do anything for me," she said. "So what?"
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. "I don't think you're following what I'm saying, Linda."
"Maybe I'm not. What are you saying?"
"Linda, when you and I first started going together, we made a sort of arrangement between us. I don't recall ever talking with you about it, but we had it more of less agreed from the start that we weren't going to fall in love with each other. Am I right?"
"Absolutely. We were going to be just good friends. That's the way I wanted it. Loving and friendship is a kick, but it's only temporary. But with real love it is permanent, and I don't want any part of a permanent arrangement. Not yet, anyway."
"Fine. Then we're agreed on that."
She shook her head. "On what?"
"On being honest with each other."
"Well-all right. If that's what you want to call it."
He fell silent again for a few moments. She was becoming slowly fascinated with his line of conversation; she couldn't for the life of her see where it was leading.
"How did you feel when you first took off your clothes for me?" he asked suddenly. "Chilly," she said. "Was that all?"
She made a face. "I suppose you want to hear me tell you I was excited over the idea of stripping for you."
"Well? Were you?"
"Yes. I'll be honest with you: I was excited. But that's got nothing to do with you. I'd be just as excited stripping for almost any man, as long as he was a man I liked."
"Sure," he said easily. "It was the same way with me. Seeing you naked, and being naked myself-it was an exciting moment. But, like you, I've felt that with others."
"So?" She spread her hands. "We were friends, we wanted to love together, and we took off our clothes. What's that got to do with anything?"
"Why did we take off our clothes?" he asked.
"That's a pretty stupid question. So we could love, of course."
"Uh-uh." He shook his head. "A man and woman don't need to strip completely for that. They don't even have to look at each other."
She scowled. "All right, then-you tell me why we stripped."
"So we could be honest with each other."
"Honest," she repeated. "There's that word again. I still don't know what you mean by it."
"When two people like each other-really like each other, on a person to person basis-and aren't teaming up just to get something they want, that's honest."
"Okay."
"When those two people decide to love, not for any ulterior motive, but simply for the purpose of sharing pleasure, that's honest, too."
"Granted."
"And when those two people remove all their clothing, show their bodies to each other completely, just the way nature made them, that's almost as honest as any two individuals can be together. A person can't keep very many secrets when he's nude."
"Almost as honest, you said. What's more honest?"
He smiled, still looking toward the river. "The manner in which those two people use each other's bodies. That's the final test of honesty."
She didn't reply. An odd thought had popped up in the back of her mind, and she felt the sudden urgent need to chase it. He continued, cutting across her line of reflection, and she lost the thought.
"To a man," he said, "to a real man, a woman's body is the most beautiful thing in the world. Not just part of her body-not just the parts painted by the old masters-but every last inch of it. When a man is with a beautiful woman, especially if she's a woman he likes, and that woman is nude, and he's feeling the excitement of being naked with her-there isn't anything he wouldn't do with her. Or for her. At least, that's the way it should be."
Her belligerence had faded, to be replaced by a quiet confusion. She had the feeling he was leading up to something monumental, but she was still unable to see what it was.
"I never thought about that before," she said. "But I guess you're right."
"Of course, I'm right. For example-" He puffed his cigarette. "How many times have I kissed your breasts?"
"Are you trying to get me excited?" she asked coldly, sensing the beginnings of excitement.
"Certainly not," he said evenly. "I'm still trying to make my point. How many times have I kissed those lovely breasts of yours? A hundred times? A thousand?"
"I don't know. I haven't kept count."
"But it's been a lot of times, hasn't it?"
"Yes," she said.
"I enjoy kissing your breasts," he said. "Do you know that?"
"I figured you probably did."
"Did you enjoy having them kissed?"
"To be honest-honest again-yes, I enjoyed it."
"But suppose I kissed you somewhere else besides your breasts. Kissing a girl on the lips is commonplace; kissing her breasts is more intimate, but no more extraordinary. Suppose-for the sake of argument-I kissed your waist, for instance."
She shuddered slightly, remembering the Lesbian revel in Dana's room, and the way the redhead had mouthed Dana's navel. "Suppose you did," she said quickly, trying to cover her strange agitation.
"Would you enjoy it?"
"I might. It would depend."
"Suppose I kissed you somewhere else." He paused again, and examined the glowing coal of his cigarette. "Suppose I kissed you everywhere else."
"That's pretty strong talk," she said.
"No, it isn't. It's honest talk. I enjoy kissing you on the mouth, or on the breasts, there's no reason why I shouldn't kiss elsewhere. Provided, of course, you enjoy it."
"We're both supposed to enjoy it," she said. "Not just one of us."
"That kind of kissing is giving, Linda. If you like the person you're with, you can derive pleasure out of giving them pleasure, in every way you can devise-naked and open and honest, with no holds barred. As I said before, there's nothing disgusting about the female body to a normal man. It's all there to be enjoyed-and, in the process, to give enjoyment."
Linda felt a bit cold, although it was warm in the car. She hugged her arms over her breasts, and was surprised to feel that her nipples had erected inside her bra. "How do you know you'd enjoy doing something like that?" she asked. "Have you ever tried?"
"Yes," he said calmly. "I have. For you, once."
She remembered. That one wild evening they'd tangled at his apartment, drunken and lustful and naked-she'd kissed him that time, and he'd done the same for her. But it had only lasted an instant before they'd gone on to further excitements.
"Do you recall that?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "But it didn't amount to anything. It was more like an accident than anything else."
"Granted. But that happened. And I enjoyed that. And I'll tell you something-I was planning to try again last night."
She was trembling now. Inside the warm breasts squeezed against her arms, she could feel the thundering of her heart. "Were you?" she asked, her voice weak.
"Yes. I wanted to. I wanted us as close together as two people could be. I really wanted to get to know you, Linda-right down to the basics."
"Is that what you meant about honesty?"
"Of course. Some people like to hide, and that's dishonest. They hide their natural bodies under layers of clothing, and if it happens that their clothing is removed and their bodies revealed, then they hide behind prejudices, silly ideas of right and wrong. Don't you see, Linda-nothing wrong can happen between a man and a woman as long as it gives them both pleasure."
She didn't say anything. Her hips shifted spasmodically against the car seat.
"I was all set to do that for you," he went on. "But you took me, instead."
Her mind whirled. She understood now what he had been driving at, and could see the sense of it. But his argument had taken on a larger meaning, something more profound than her relationship with him, or with any man.
Honesty-she thought. The honest use of the body.
What did that remind her of?
"I would have done that," he said, "as long as you liked. For a few seconds, for a few minutes, for an hour, or until I had given you all the pleasure I could. Do you understand, Linda? I would have gone on that way until there was no more pleasure for you to have-until you'd gotten the most you could get out of it." He paused, and turned finally to look at her. "The way you did with me," he said-
The idea was becoming clearer to her now. Naked bodies, and honesty, and the very special sort of kiss he was talking about-it all added up into a fantastic new concept.
"All right, then," she said softly. "I think I see your point."
"Do you?"
"Yes." She felt her mouth smile. "You owe me one."
His face went slack for an instant, then rearranged itself into tight, excited lines. "I suppose I do. You gave me everything I wanted last night, so I guess I owe you the favor in return."
She nodded, still smiling.
"Do you want to be repaid, Linda?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"Now."
He blinked his eyes. "Now? Here? In the car?"
"Yes. Right now, right here. If there isn't room enough in the car, then let's go outside. But I want you to pay me back."
"Linda-"
"I agree with everything you said, Jack. I understand it all. I want what you owe me, and I'm not in any mood to wait, I want to know...." She caught the sentence before it could be completed, and then wondered what she had been about to say.
He didn't seem to notice her pause. "I think we could manage in the back seat," he said.
"In the back seat, then. It's all right with me."
"It would be better, though, if we drove back to the city-back to my place."
"I already told you, Jack-I don't want to wait. Now."
He sat staring at her for a few seconds, then opened the door on his side and got out. His car was a two-door model; Linda waited until he'd opened the door on the passenger side, then climbed out onto the grass. He reached around her and pulled the seat forward, making room for her to get in back.
She slid in across the rear seat, feeling the coolness of the vinyl fabric against the backs of her legs as her skirt rode up behind her. This time, she made no move to tug it down.
He got in next to her and closed the door. As an afterthought, he locked it, then leaned over the front front seat and did the same to the door on the driver's side.
When he turned back to her, she was busy opening her clothing. She was wearing a white blouse which unbuttoned down the front. She pulled it open to reveal a white, lacy brassiere. Then her fingers went to the hem of her skirt.
"Are you going to get all undressed?" he asked, his voice thick.
"Not all the way," she said. "Just enough." She lifted her skirt, drew it up, then raised off the car seat. The skirt was bunched around her waist. Beneath it, she wore flimsy panties, and underneath those, the customary garter-belt.
"Do you want me to get undressed?" he asked.
"I don't care," she replied.
He put a palm to her leg, covering one of the garter snaps. His little finger grazed the top of her nylons, his thumb pressed lightly against the lacy leg-hem of her panties.
"Not yet," she said.
He looked up from her half-nude loveliness. "What?"
"There's something I want you to do first."
"Anything, baby. Tell me."
She dug her elbows into the back of the seat, arching her body forward. "Take off my bra," she said.
His hands left her leg and went in between her back and the loosened fabric of her blouse. The position was awkward; he fumbled for a few seconds before his fingers found and undid the snaps.
She felt the cups slide away from her breasts, felt the heavy globes settle with their natural weight as the strapless bra came off. The top seam of the brassiere grazed her nipples, and she felt twin shafts of excitement pierce her soft breasts as she realized how excited those pebbled, coral circles had become.
He put the bra on the seat behind him. His hands made no move to touch her. She looked down at her breasts, and saw with pleasure how creamy-smooth they seemed in the faint starlight falling through the window.
"What now, baby?" he asked tautly. She moved her shoulders. Her breasts shimmied voluptuously.
"Kiss them," she said. "Kiss them as well as you know how. Kiss them as if you really meant it."
"Yes, baby-yes." The words made a warm breeze against her flesh as he brought his head to her. His two hands curled underneath the heavy fruit and lifted, bringing up the tips at just the right angle.
Her right nipple first.
She laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. His kiss was warm, alive. At first, his kiss was only that; but, as the passion of the moment got through to him, the movements became more frantic, more exciting. She felt the aureole bloom.
She clenched her teeth, hissing air between them.
He paid homage to her right breast with a skill she'd never suspected was in him, drawing her sensitive flesh tightly, nipping just easily enough to cause no pain, then prodding back down on the tender coin.
Who, she wondered, would ever have thought him so clever? He had kissed her breasts countless times before, but never with such fervor, such technique.
If his kiss could do these wonderful things to her bust, how much more might it be capable of when the time came to explore new territory?
She could hardly wait to find out. But she controlled the natural rhythms of her lusts, not wanting to rush this moment, wanting to savor every sensation, weigh each pleasure against the strange, new idea which had grown in her mind.
He pulled away. Covering her just-kissed breast with a cupping palm, he moved his head to the left one. His kiss made a warm circle of delight around the throbbing tip.
There-the idea was really beginning to take shape. She could almost see the entire pattern now.
In another few minutes, she'd have the answer. And how funny it was, really, that poor Jack, this silly, sincere, and embarrassed male should be the one responsible for revealing such a truth to her.
Her breasts heaved against his caress.
Of course, she thought-how simple it all was when you looked at it in the right light. Naked people should be honest together, but that was only possible if they were first and foremost honest with themselves. Two people hiding their individual natures couldn't produce any sort of truth or honesty between them, and without that, the pleasures of intimacy could never scale the heights for which they had been designed. As Jack had said-nothing which gave mutual pleasure by mutual consent between two people could be wrong.
No, that wasn't what he said. He hadn't said two people-he'd said a man and a woman....
Well, that only went to show how much he knew about things.
His hands were cupping the outer curves of her breasts now, pulling them together. His face was against them. She could feel his breathing, feel also the light bristling of his stubble against her malleable flesh.
The sensation did not fit the pattern she was building, so she thrust it from her mind.
"Now...." she said. The word was no more than ,'a whisper, but he heard her.
She didn't have to tell him to release her breasts. He lifted his face, planted one last kiss to each of them in turn, then drew his hands away.
She didn't have to tell him to change position. He did that quickly and instinctively. She felt his body move, felt the brush of his clothing against her nylon-sheathed legs as he bent over.
She didn't have to tell him to remove her panties. His fingers found the elastic waistband without fumbling, and began to roll the garment slowly off her hips. She felt the air caressing her naked waist, the rounded flesh of her hips. When the rolled edge of the panties touched the first tender cleft of her buttocks, she raised herself slightly from the seat. The panties slid down and off over her high-heels.
She didn't have to tell him the best way to arrange her. His fingers curled behind her, lifting upward until her feet were almost off the floor of the car, until the toes of her shoes were pointing like a ballet dancer. She felt the muscles of her calves flex as she let the weight of her legs down onto the tips of her shoes. There was a small ridge just under the front of the seat-cushion; she hooked her high-heels into it, and then everything was perfect.
She didn't have to tell him to kneel. He knelt, somehow shifting around and finding space on the floor for his knees without disturbing the artful arrangement of her limbs. She felt his legs against her ankles, but that was another sensation which didn't fit the dream of the moment, so she ignored it.
She didn't have to tell him to begin.
He began.
His lips kissed just beyond one knee. His hands slid down her legs to bracket the outer curves of her buttocks. He moved along, kissing her flesh through the wispy nylon of her stockings.
Then, suddenly, there was no more nylon.
He worked past the tops of her stockings, ducked the cold metal clasp of the garter, and inched onto bare flesh.
Bare-she had never felt more bare. He was absolutely right: this was the ultimate thrill. That other, the one they had shared together so many times, that was performed by almost every man and woman in the world, and by most of the animals in the world as well-that was nothing compared to this. That was simply instinct.
This was honesty.
But honesty, she thought, begins at home.
Then his kiss reached her, and an awesome thrill climbed her spine, electrified her brain-
And there were no more questions left unanswered.
Afterward, she made him take her home. She didn't say a word to him during the drive-not even to thank him. She sat staring straight ahead, watching the road unreel under the car, as if she were all alone, as if he meant absolutely nothing to her.
And that was exactly how she felt.
After all-he was a man, wasn't he?
CHAPTER SEVEN
At work that day, he did something he hadn't done in years.
It began as a small tugging sensation in the muscles of his face. He was bent in his usual concentration over a ledger, and it was some moments before he noticed the odd contraction around his mouth. He touched his fingers to his lips, and felt with amazement that he was smiling.
Strange ... What was there to smile about? A smile signified a calm, quiet sort of pleasure, and there were no such pleasures in his life these days. He couldn't even remember the last time his mouth had lifted in a smile, but it had been many long years ago, probably during the old days, before the welts-those years of heat and youth which he could never quite remember, but which were occurring more and more frequently in his thoughts of late.
Yet, there it was. A smile. Of all things.
He returned his attention to the work, bowing his head low over the ledger, hiding the smile from his fellow employees. He never smiled, and they'd probably noticed that, because they watched him-he knew they watched him, not out of interest in him, thank God, but just out of idle curiosity-they watched him, and they no doubt thought of him as a man who never smiled. If they were to see him smiling now, it would certainly attract their attention, and he didn't want that, not now, not even when things were going so well. If people began to notice him again, as they had once before, it would spoil everything.
And it was so close.
The thought startled him. What was so close? Why had that particular phrase entered his mind at that moment?
He didn't know.
But something was happening.
Lesbians, he thought, blonde Lesbians. And self-gratification. And red welts, or bars, or whatever. And pain. Yes-pain, too. Terrible pain, pain so intense it was a pleasure.
The girls across the way. Was it the memory of what he had seen the night before that teased his mind with this new thought? The Lesbians, tangling, caught in their exotic lust-or was it the blonde, as trapped in her way as the other two girls, forced to give herself satisfaction in the only way available....
These things were part, but not all, of what was happening inside him. The past was part of it, too; the past touched the present in various subtle ways, bridging the years with points of similarity, echoes of memories that were somehow also echoes of current events. The past and the present were blending, and their mixture was going to produce a new future.
He thought of the genie in him, and felt a blend of fear and sensuous anticipation.
The day passed without his awareness. He remained crouched over his ledger, automatically doing the work for which he had been hired, letting his fingers fill in column after column of figures while his mind pieced together an elaborate design. He was conscious of the fact that he really knew very little about himself, but that had been the case for so long a time that he no longer wondered about it. That is, until now.
Now, those forgotten years before the welts had changed everything became vital to the new thing he was feeling. Unless he could arrange the past into a recognizable pattern, he would never be able to understand the strange forces tugging at him.
Before the welts....
He was a young man. He went with hookers sometimes, as a young man will. He felt the standard young man's urges, and found the normal young man's pleasures in satisfying them. And, for a time, that had been enough.
But he had changed. As the years passed, a shifting had taken place in his thoughts, and something altogether unlike the thoughts of a young man had begun appearing in his brain.
He couldn't recall what it was.
But it had been powerful, that new urge-powerful enough to grip him as nothing had ever gripped him, powerful enough to change the course of his life....
It had driven him to do something.
Lesbian. Blonde.
Then the welts.
Then pain, and more welts, or were they bars, or were they the welts somehow grown into bars? Then darkness, and silence.
He had changed from an ordinary young man to a different sort of man, and the change had caused him to do something, and whatever he'd done had attracted attention. Yes, that was the way it had been, that was the danger of having people interested in you-and though he'd found total and incredible satisfaction in the thing he had done, he'd been forced to pay for it, with welts.
He had no idea how long the silent time following the welts had lasted. His next awareness of himself had been as he was now-no longer a young man, no longer a man who went to hookers or any woman, but a man with something bottled up inside him, a man who lived in dreams because reality was somehow too dangerous.
All the days he could remember-and there had been at least ten years of them-had been the same. He went to and from his job. He ignored the people around him. When forced to associate with another human being, he made the association as brief as possible.
And when the pressures inside him demanded release, as they had only yesterday, he went to his favorite bookshop, bought what was required to feed his cruel fantasies, and found relief within the safe privacy of his bedroom.
Was all that now going to change?
Again he felt the mixture of panic and expectation.
He left work that evening with his mind still spinning. The subway ride seemed to take no time at all; it was still light when he came up onto the street. He headed straight for his apartment building, hoping that in the familiar atmosphere of his room, with the photos of the nude women looking at him from the walls, his thoughts might be more easily untangled.
He climbed the stairs to his floor. As he headed down the hall, he thought suddenly of Miss Gaynor. Her door was closed, and he knew he should be feeling relief over not having to speak to her, but instead he sensed a small knot of disappointment, as if he had missed something, as if an important part of the scheme had been passed by.
He couldn't identify the sensation, and so went straight to his apartment and locked himself in. He took off his topcoat, threw it on the living room couch, then undid his tie and opened the top few buttons of his white shirt. Feeling comfortable, he walked back into the kitchen and cooked himself a can of stew.
He usually ate only one meal a day-lunch-and substituted the rest of the time on snacks. The can of stew was supposed to be his Saturday meal, but he ate it anyway. Some extra food would help make him strong, and strength was going to be important when the time came.
The time for what?
He didn't know.
But it was coming, sure as fate, and he was determined to be prepared for it.
His meal finished, he ran hot water into his dish and left it in the sink. He went into the bedroom and walked to the window.
The building across the court looked different in the light, but he had no trouble identifying the two windows he had watched the previous evening. There-that was the window which had framed the Lesbians. And there-that was the one with the blonde. The rooms were empty at the moment, but perhaps the girls would appear in them later on. He hoped so, although it wasn't really necessary to his plans.
How strange that he should know the required elements of his plans without being able to understand the plans themselves.
He left the window and went over to sit on the bed. The stack of photos still rested in the wire rack on top of his night table. He recalled now that he had only looked at the topmost photo, that there were quite a few more beneath it waiting to be examined.
This evening, there was no strong needs screaming to be satisfied, but it would be a pleasure nevertheless to go through the rest of his new photos. When he had seen them all, he could add them to the huge collection he had in the bottom of his bureau, the collection of books and pictures of which he was so proud. And after that, perhaps he would take a stroll down to the local magazine store, pick out a periodical or two, and add some new women to the gallery on his walls. That would be a pleasant way to spend the evening.
He picked the photos up in his hands, lifted off the top one, and passed it to the bottom.
It was the same man and woman again.
The man still wore the black hood, and nothing else; his hand still held the whip.
But the woman was wearing something new.
Welts.
This photo had apparently been taken a few minutes after the first one, because the woman's naked, white, tormented body was striped with lash marks, across her waist, across the tops of her legs, even across the vulnerable breasts. One welt in particular drew his eye; it ran diagonally from her right shoulder down across her left breast, right through the dark circle of the nipple.
The woman was screaming in such utter agony that her face seemed to be all mouth.
His eyes bulged, and the perking started again in his skull as he leaned forward to examine the welt more closely.
There was a knock at his front door.
His head snapped up and he stared wildly around for an instant, clutching the photos to his chest. It took him a while to realize that the knocking was coming from the front door, and wasn't the sound of someone there in the room with him.
He got up, crossed quickly to his bureau, and hid the photos in the bottom drawer. Then he went to answer the knocking.
No one had ever knocked at his apartment door that he could recall. Because the event was unfamiliar, he forgot momentarily that it would be very dangerous to allow anyone in his apartment. He thought of this as he unlocked the door, but by then it was too late.
Miss Gaynor stepped nimbly by him and went into the living room. "Hi, Mr. Thornton," she said over her shoulder. "I thought I heard you come in."
He stood with his hand frozen on the knob, then slowly closed the door. Without consciously thinking about it, he set the lock.
Miss Gaynor was examining the room with an appraising eye. "Say-you got this place fixed up pretty nice. Needs a woman's touch, of course, but aside from that-" She nodded with satisfaction, and turned to look at him. "Place is about like I figured it would be. Plain, neat-like you." She grinned.
She was wearing another of her drab housedresses, a garment that overlapped in front, and buttoned down from her right shoulder. Her feet were encased in fuzzy bedroom slippers.
As far as he could see, the housedress and slippers were all she was wearing.
"Miss Gaynor," he said. He wondered what was about to happen. The ticking in his head was growing louder, and there was no reason for that; the ticking occurred only when pleasure was building, and he had put the photos away, he wasn't looking at the man with the whip and the girl with the welts, now, he was looking at Miss Gaynor, and the ticking should be diminishing rather than increasing. But it wasn't.
She was still grinning. "I bet you're wondering why I'm here, aren't you?"
He shrugged, trying to keep his face smooth. "It's nice of you to drop in, really."
"I just wanted to see what your place looked like." She waved a hand. "You know-how you live, and all. I got curious."
"Curious?" The word felt like poison on his tongue.
"I've been in every other apartment on this floor, one time or another," she went on. "And I got to thinking-here's this nice bachelor down the hall, and he's the only one I never visited, or who never visited me. I asked you a lot of times to come in and say hello, but you never would."
"I'm ... busy. I'm frequently very busy."
"Yeah, so you say. But you're not busy now, are you?"
He breathed deeply. "No."
"Maybe it doesn't bother you," she continued, "but I get pretty damn lonesome in my place sometimes, just watching television with nobody to talk to. It ain't good for somebody to be by themselves so much of the time. People ought to get together once in a while-" She lifted her eyebrows. Maybe have some fun."
"Fun?"
"What do you do in here all the time alone, Mr. Thornton? You're home most nights-I hear you come in. And you never seem to bring any friends in here with you. So what do you do with yourself?"
He moistened his lips, and tried to think of an answer.
"Don't you have no friends?" she asked. "No girl friends?"
"No," he said quickly.
Her face went elaborately sad. "Aw, poor Mr. Thornton. That's terrible. How come you don't have no lady friends? Maybe you ain't such a youngster any more, but you still look like you have what it takes."
"I ... I don't know any ladies."
"Sure you do." She brought a hand across under her breasts and fingered her bare upper-arm. The motion drew the front of her dress tight against her bust.
"I do?" The liquid ticking in his brain was louder now. He felt strangely remote, out of touch with the moment, as if he were viewing Miss Gaynor through the wrong end of a telescope.
"Sure," she said. Her forearm inched upward, making globes out of her breasts. "How about me?"
He didn't answer her.
"I been thinking about you a lot, Mr. Thornton. I really have."
Danger, said his mind, in a voice as loud as a scream, in letters as red as welts, danger, danger....
"You and me, living right down the hall from each other, and alone most of the time-I thought about that, and I got the idea that maybe we should get together. How does that strike you, Mr. Thornton?"
He didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on her breasts.
She noticed the direction of his gaze and smiled. "I ain't no prude, Mr. Thornton. When I was a girl, I used to have a lot of fun keeping men from being lonely. And I ain't lost the knack, either. Maybe I ain't as smooth and pretty as I once was, but I still got a lot more than you might think."
He didn't answer. His throat was closed, the bright liquor of lust was hammering in his skull.
"I really have still got it," she said. Her body shifted position slightly, her shoulders angling one way, her hips another. "Like to see?"
He didn't answer.
"I ain't got nothing on underneath this dress, Mr. Thornton. It'd be real easy for me to show you. You want I should do that?"
He didn't answer.
"It's up to you," she said, her voice losing its easy tone and taking on an edge of tension. "Say the word, and I'll let you look."
He didn't answer.
"Say the word, and I'll let you have me." She drew in a long trembling breath. "It's been a while for me. I really need a good man...."
The pounding in his head threatened to drown out her words.
"Say yes, Mr. Thornton. Come on. I can show you a good time, and I'm sure you can do the same for me. Just nod yes, and we'll have a real good time together."
Dimly, he felt his throbbing head bob once.
The smile returned to her face. "Good for you, Mr. Thornton," she said. "And good for me, too. I hope."
She brought her hands up to her neckline and began undoing the buttons. There were five of them; she had them open faster than he could count them.
The front flap of her housedress fell away, but the inner flap continued to cling to her for a moment, concealing her breasts but laying bare the entire right side of her body, from armpit to leg.
One glance told him she hadn't been lying: she wasn't wearing a thing under the housedress.
She arched her shoulders backward, and the dress came open completely. Her hands went behind her, tugging at the material, and the garment slipped from her shoulders and fell in a pile at her feet.
Her body was oddly exciting. It was obvious that she had once been very pretty, very desirable. The passage of years had blurred her good features, but the proportions were still there, as if she were a sensuous young woman seen through a haze of some kind.
Her breasts hung a bit lower than they should, but there was a great deal of firmness left in them. The nipples were brown and slightly oval, but the round points of excitement at the centers of them still thrust forward vigorously. Her torso was well-formed, and not too bony; her waist was narrow, her hips angular.
She put her hands on her waist and shook her hips at him in a practiced, wanton gesture. He watched threads of muscle chase up and down her legs. She had obviously known many men in her time; her body looked well-used, as if the hands and kisses of all her lovers had gradually eroded her flesh.
"Here I am, Mr. Thornton," she said huskily. "I look good to you?"
His head bobbed again. He felt on the brink of something vast and incredible, a yawning chasm which beckoned to him with inexorable gravity. It was only through a tremendous effort that he maintained his equilibrium-how much easier it would be to simply let go, topple forward to that calling unknown, let himself fall to whatever destiny awaited him. The pattern would be whole then, the genie would be free, and all his cravings would be satisfied.
How simple that would be. And how wonderful....
"Here I am," she said again. "And you like me, don't you? I can tell, Mr. Thornton. It's too late to try to hide it."
He realized what had happened to him. Without his jacket, with no newspaper or other object in his hand to act as a shield, wearing only a shirt and trousers, the inevitable result of her lustful display had betrayed him.
And that did it.
The liquid bubbled into his skull, deluging his brain with fire, driving reason before it. The balance was destroyed and he reeled forward into the chasm.
The genie strained furiously at the walls of its prison.
She lifted her arms out as he came toward her. The red-nailed fingers of her hands curled in anticipation.
"Move over here, Mr. Thornton. Let's get to work."
Her hands touched his belt, dipped to the tab of the zipper. Her fingers shifted the twin layers of clothing, and he was suddenly free.
"God," she breathed. "Who would have thought."
The red horror in his brain was sending signals out along his nerves. His muscles moved to obey.
"Mr. Thornton," she said fervently. "I've known a crowd of men in my time, but you've...."
He hit her.
His fist rocketed straight out from his shoulder and exploded in her face. He felt the snap of bone as the bridge of her nose collapsed, felt with pleasure the colossal impact of his blow.
Then his fist had followed through beyond her, his body had turned sideways with the force of his motion, and he was looking over his shoulder at her.
Time slowed to a crawl. It seemed to him that she hung suspended above the floor, her spine bowed, her head tilted backward on her thin neck, her breasts squeezed between her upper-arms like white, bulging eyes with dilated brown pupils at the centers of them; and even though her head was too far back for him to see her face, he could recognize her pain from the expression of her breasts, as if her nipples could actually see him and reflect the agony he had inflicted upon her.
The red ticking in his brain skipped a beat, then began pounding again.
Time returned to the room in a rush.
He straightened his body and turned to face her just as she hit the floor. The back of her skull rebounded once against the boards with a hollow thump; the trembling shapes of her breasts danced foolishly across her torso with the impact. Then her body was still, and her head was lolling to one side.
He moved forward and looked at her. The flesh of her face was white, except for the region of her eyes; there was blood where the bridge of her nose had once been, and the skin all around it was rapidly turning blue-black. Her mouth was open, and even though he knew she was unconscious, he could almost swear those lips were shaped to form a scream.
Now.
Now, he thought. It was time. The waiting was over. The empty years since the welts were all behind him, and now there would be welts again, and all the shuddering pleasures he had once known. No more photographs, no more fantasies, no more solitary lusts, no more imaginary women. This woman was real.
And the time had come.
He knelt on the floor and wondered how to begin. The plan, the scheme, the monstrous pattern was more clear now than it had ever been, but still not quite clear enough. He knew there was something that must be done, but he was not yet completely sure what that thing might be.
If only he could remember the time of the welts....
He reached out and took both her breasts in his hands. They were more soft than they should have been; when he squeezed them, they yielded slushily to his fingers, like balloons filled with oatmeal. He crushed them down against her, lifted them away from her body, mauled them savagely all over her, bearing down so furiously at one point that he heard the crack of a rib.
The pleasure refused to come.
He grabbed the tips of her breasts in his fingers, pinching and tugging the sensitive flesh with all his strength. She felt that, even through the veil of unconsciousness; a soft moan welled out of her throat, like the sound of wind in a damp cave. But the sound did not repeat itself, and nothing further happened, and so he was forced to stop. When he looked at her nipples they seemed to be spreading. It took him a moment to realize that those widening crimson circles were blood. He looked at his fingers, and discovered blood all over them.
And still the pleasure refused to appear.
He glanced at himself. His clothes were open, just as she had left them. And he was ready, ready with an ache that threatened to consume his vitals.
He was ready, and she was there, her defenses against his assault destroyed, her breasts running blood-
Was that what he wanted?
He didn't know, but he had to try, he had to do something. The pressure was too terrible, and he knew if he didn't find release shortly, he would go mad....
He bent forward, setting his palms down in the blood beneath her arms.
He shifted slightly, and after a moment's search he found a yielding. Her excitement had been genuine, he found; and still with her.
And this, too, was familiar, although it still wasn't the entire answer. He could remember this thrill now; it was the sensation of velvet gliding he had felt so many times with the tramps. He recalled it from his youth-but those had been the days before the welts, before the big satisfaction had taken him.
Perhaps it had thrilled him once, but it held nothing for him now. He tried, slowly at first, then faster, bruising the white flesh.
But nothing happened.
The pleasure refused him.
After a while he stopped until he caught his breath, then pushed himself back up. He stared at his dwindled lust uncomprehendingly. The passion was gone without ever having satisfied itself.
So close, so very close-closer than he had been in years, closer to the ultimate pleasure than any of his books or photographs or lonely imaginings had ever taken him.
Close, but no more than that.
The elements, he realized, were wrong. She was a living woman, she was naked, he had given her pain, he had mutilated her body, he had become a master over her-that part was fine.
But her hair was brown and that was the wrong color. It should be blonde.
Blonde, because she had been a blonde.
Her body was etched with years, and that was wrong, too. Her body should have been young.
Young, because she had been a young blonde.
And, worst of all, she was the sort of woman who found her pleasure with men, who took payment.
She should have been a Lesbian.
Once, he had done something to a young, blonde Lesbian.
How clear the memories were suddenly becoming. He could almost see the girl to whom he had done the thing. But he still couldn't see the thing itself.
Something was needed-an object, a tool. A ... weapon? Was that it? Something he could hold in his hand?
Yes-that was part of the vision, and an important part.
But what? A whip?
Whips made welts, and welts were necessary. He tested the notion in his mind and found it wanting. It would be a great pleasure to whip this prone woman, to cover her body with terrible welts, beautiful red welts-
But that wouldn't duplicate the past, because he hadn't used a whip that time with the young, blonde Lesbian.
Something else.
He glanced up out of his thoughts and saw that it had grown dark outside his window. He remembered the building across the way-the two Lesbians and the blonde. If only they would perform for him tonight ... he had the feeling that another display of the kind he had watched the evening before would clarify everything in his mind, provide the key to the last door, open it, allow the genie of his past to blossom forth.
Yes, he thought, the windows-the Lesbians. He pondered the woman on the floor before him for a moment. Something must be done with her. Eventually, she would wake, wake to terrible pain, and cruel wounds. She would probably begin screaming, and that would attract attention to him and his deeds, just as the notice of his enemies had been drawn to him after he'd done that thing to the blonde. He couldn't permit that to happen, because it would mean another time of darkness, of welts that were not really welts and so held no pleasure for him.
He stood up, stepped over one of her lax legs, and went to the bathroom. He ran water into the bathtub, opening both taps wide so it would fill rapidly. When the water-level had begun to climb satisfactorily, he returned to the living room.
He bent over and got his hands under her armpits. She was heavier than he expected, but he managed to drag her across the floor to the bathroom without too much strain. He propped her in a sitting position against the side of the tub.
She began to whimper, and he realized he was just in time. He caught her around the shoulders and behind the knees, and lifted her into the tub. The water closed over her torn breasts; clouds of blood grew around her nipples.
He released her knees first, then her shoulders. Her head went under. The mousy hair fanned lazily out around her face. A string of bubbles began rising from her lips.
He looked down through the water at her still face, and all at once her eyes were open. He couldn't be sure, but it pleased him to imagine that she could see him in that moment, realize the ultimate domination he held over her.
Her lips twisted, and one huge, silvery bubble burst from between them.
He waited for a while, but nothing else happened.
The bleeding of her breasts stopped. Her mouth and eyes stayed open.
He left her there, at peace beneath the red-tinted water, and went to his bedroom window.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She left Jack staring after her from his car, went quickly across the pavement, and climbed the steps into her building.
He was still wondering about her; she could sense it. He knew he had given her satisfaction on that hill overlooking the river-he would have to be deaf and blind to think otherwise-but although he understood her lusts, he couldn't quite comprehend her attitudes. His caress had been a gesture of peace, designed to heal the breach between them, but of course it had done nothing of the kind, and he knew that.
To hell with him, she thought, slamming the vestibule door behind her and starting up the stairs to the third floor. She had more important things to think about. She had a whole new world to explore.
She could hardly wait to get started.
As she unlocked her apartment door, she had the sudden fear that Dana wouldn't be in. It would be hard to take a disappointment like that, now that she had made up her mind. If circumstances forced her to sit around the apartment alone for the entire rest of the evening, sit alone with her new ideas, her new lusts-she wasn't sure she'd be able to stand that.
When she stepped into the living room, she saw there was a light on in Dana's bedroom. Relieved, she locked the door, and headed toward the light. She had almost reached Dana's room and was about to call out to her, when she heard the voices.
Dana was talking to someone.
Linda stopped a few feet short of the doorway, and listened. It was the redhead-she was certain of it. The same redhead who had been there only last night. Dana and her redhead were together in the bedroom, and that meant it wasn't just a social call. It meant they were enjoying the pleasures of lesbianism.
Linda shivered, and wondered what she should do. She wanted very much to simply walk through that door and announce herself, tell both girls the thoughts which had been going through her mind and her decisions concerning them-in other words, tell them she had decided to try Lesbianism, and ask if they would let her join the fun.
Somehow, she didn't think that would work out too well. Her sudden appearance would be quite a shock to both Dana and the redhead; after all, they probably thought they were alone in the apartment. If she just barged in on them, it might shatter their mood, break up whatever had started between them-and unless they were in the right frame of mind, Linda wouldn't get a thing.
She stood in the hall and listened to their voices. She couldn't make out the individual words, but the tone of their conversation was unmistakable. They had either started their depraved play, or were about to start; they weren't just talking about the weather.
She dredged her mind for an idea. She had to think of something. After all she had been through, all the mental turmoil and self-accusation, she couldn't bear the thought of not getting what she obviously needed so badly.
Suddenly, she had the perfect solution. She turned, went silently back to the living room, and began getting undressed.
How simple it was, really. If she came through the door of their room fully clothed, they might easily think she had surprised them in the midst of perversion and was about to make a fuss. But if she came through that same door naked....
They would know immediately why she was there.
Her nudity would announce her intention better than words ever could.
Congratulating herself on her cleverness, she stripped off her blouse and skirt, unhooked and rolled off her stockings. As she removed her bra, she felt the tender nipples still wearing the prints of Jack's kisses. His kiss continued to echo in her flesh as she rolled her panties down to the floor and stepped out of them.
Yes, she thought, he had given her pleasure, just as he'd promised. But the fact that he was a man had nothing to do with the pleasure. And that had been the final revelation for Linda.
The lusts she had felt in the back of his car could have been produced by anyone.
And, since that was the case, why should she ever bother again with a pig-like man, why ever allow herself to be pawed and mauled when all the pleasure she could ever want was available from a woman?
She couldn't think of a single reason why.
She was naked. She stood very straight in the darkened living room, and ran her hands over her voluptuously mounded flesh. Jack had used her well, but that didn't mean she wasn't in the mood for more. The Lesbian drive she had discovered in herself seemed far deeper than her old normal drive, and it would take a great deal more to satisfy.
But so what? There were two women in Dana's bedroom who would no doubt be happy to give Linda all the satisfaction she desired.
Smiling, she turned and went cautiously down the hall toward the lighted room.
At the door, she paused for a single second, inhaling deeply to fan the coal of her courage. Then she stepped into the room.
Dana and the redhead were lying side by side on the bed. They were naked, and caressing each other's breasts. Their eyes were closed, and at the moment they weren't saying anything.
Linda cleared her throat. "May I cut in?"
Their caressing hands stopped short. The two naked bodies stiffened and the expressions of lustful enjoyment cleared from their faces. Slowly, Dana rolled her head in the direction of the doorway and opened her eyes. The redhead did the same.
Dana's features went slack with surprise. "Linda," she said. "What the hell?"
Linda came a few steps farther into the' room, moving with self-conscious grace. She could feel the soft flow of muscle in her hips, the gentle swaying of her ripe breasts as she moved. She knew how appealing such a display would be to a man, and hoped it was having the same effect on these two women.
"I asked if I could cut in," Linda said. "You look like you're having fun."
Dana frowned. "What happened to your clothes?"
"I took them off. I came home a few minutes ago and saw you two were nude, and I figured I should be nude myself before joining the party."
"But-" Dana sat up in bed. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? I don't think you understand what's going on here."
"Sure, I understand. You and your friend here-you're Lesbians."
Dana glanced around at the redhead. The girl shrugged. She turned back to Linda. "That's right. How long have you known about us?"
"Since last night," Linda said. "I got home early, and watched you through the door. I saw the whole thing." She dipped her head. "I guess maybe it wasn't very nice of me to spy on you like that-but I just couldn't resist. The things you were doing were so fascinating, I just had to see them all. I kept wondering what it would be like to have a woman make love to me that way. I've been thinking about it ever since. I can't get it out of my mind."
The redhead grinned and put a palm on Dana's hip. "See, Dana? What did I tell you?"
Dana ignored the girl's remark. "Linda,-I hope you don't have the wrong idea about this. This isn't just a game-it's a pretty serious thing. If you're not a hundred per cent sure of what you want, going for a thing like this could really leave a scar on you."
Linda tossed her head impatiently. "I know what I want, Dana. I've had it with men up to here. Men make me sick." She smiled. "I don't like them any more, but my desire is still intact. And that means there's only one sex left to take care of me-my own. How about it, Dana?"
"Come on," said the redhead. "We'll make a threesome."
"Shut up," said Dana heatedly. "I don't like this. It's too quick. She'll get hurt-somebody will get hurt."
"Nobody's going to get hurt," Linda said. "I've thought the whole thing out, and I know what I want, what I need. Now, are you going to teach me, or do I have to go into the Village and find love there?"
The redhead sat up and slid off the bed. Dana reached out a hand to restrain her, but the girl shook it off. She crossed the room, smiling.
"Your name's Linda, right?" Linda returned the smile. "That's right. What's your name?"
"Tory." The girl laughed. "That's not my real name, of course-it's a stage name. I'm a dancer."
Linda nodded. "You have a body like a dancer."
Tory stopped a few feet from Linda and struck a graceful, naked pose. "You like my body, Linda?"
"Yes."
"Would you like to touch my body, Linda? Maybe even kiss me?"
"Yes," said Linda. "Would you like to do the same thing for me?"
Tory was staring fixedly at Linda's breasts. "God, would I ever...."
Dana stood up quickly and walked over between them. "Cut it out, Tory. This girl doesn't know what she's doing."
"Damn you," said the redhead savagely. "You're not fooling me, honey-you want her for yourself."
"Leave her alone, Tory. Maybe you'd better leave."
Tory laughed harshly. "I'm not going anywhere, honey. I'm going to take this girl to bed with me and give her the time of her life. Now, if you want to join us, well and good. If you don't, then just butt out."
"Don't start handing orders to me," said Dana tautly. "This is my room, you know."
Tory turned to look at Linda. "How about it, baby? You have a room of your own?"
Linda smiled. "Sure. Right down the hall."
"Okay. Then let's go there. Just you and me. I'll show you all the ropes. How does that sound?"
"It sounds just great, Tory. I'm with you."
Dana put a hand on Tory's arm. "Now wait a damn minute...."
Tory whirled, her nude body flexing with tensed muscle. She cracked her open palm across Dana's face. "Go find a man," she said, as if the statement were a profound insult. "Linda and I have what we want."
"Linda," said Dana in a pleading voice. "You're getting in deeper than you can handle, kid. Believe me-we don't just do this for fun, Tory and me. We do because we have to, because there's something crazy inside us...."
"Don't listen to her, honey," said Tory, slipping an arm around Linda's bare waist. Her fingers grazed the top of Linda's buttocks. We know what we want
-don't "we, honey?"
Linda nodded. The touch of Tory's fingers was thrilling her beyond words.
"You've got to believe me, Linda," said Dana helplessly. Her cheek was reddening from Tory's blow. "Jumping into it this way, you'll just hurt yourself. Please wait-take some time to think it over...."
"I've thought it over long enough," said Linda. "Now I'm going to do something about it." She turned to Tory and cuddled her naked hip against the girl's smooth leg. "Let's go," she said.
Dana followed them into the hall, still pleading. Linda's mind was filled with the warm anticipation of pleasure, but she could still hear Dana's voice, and a part of her wondered what Dana was so excited about. Could it be that the redhead was right
-that Dana wanted Linda all to herself? The idea didn't really hold water, though; after all, she and Dana had been living together three months, and if Dana had nursed any real desire for her it certainly would have manifested itself by now.
But Dana was agitated over something, and as Linda let the redhead's palms urge her forward into her room, she wondered if Dana knew something she didn't know, some important fact she had missed. The idea of lesbianism was new, attractive, and seemed to be the answer to all her questions, but was it perhaps not quite as simple as she thought?
It was too late to worry about it. Linda looked around just in time to see Tory close the door in Dana's unhappy face. Dana continued to speak through the door as Tory brought Linda over to the bed, but her words were too dim to be understood.
Linda reclined on the familiar mattress, and stared into Tory's smiling face as the girl knelt on the bed beside her.
"Tory, are you sure you want to do this? I don't really have any idea what I'm supposed to do, you know? This is all new to me."
"Don't worry about anything, honey." The redhead's lips were curiously moist. "You don't have to know a thing. I'll show you everything."
Linda shivered, and threw a glance at the door. "What about her?"
"Dana? Forget her. She'll shut up after a while."
"But she's my friend, Tory. I don't like to treat her this way."
Tory's face went suddenly dark with anger. "Hell, you'll treat her the way I tell you to treat her. I'm in charge here-I'm in charge of her, and now I'm in charge of you, too." Her hand came down heavily on Linda's waist.
"In charge?" Linda repeated. "I don't understand. I thought you and Dana were friends."
Tory laughed. "Friends? Never. I don't have friends, kid. I have slaves. I collect girls like you and Dana."
Linda felt a ball of icy fear growing in her. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"It's my hobby," Tory said. "I find girls who need what I can give them, and I give it to them in spades. I really know how to make a girl happy, too. The few gals who've tried to break off from me and get their loving from somebody else always come crawling back to me eventually. I'm their master."
Linda listened desperately for the sound of Dana's voice. But it had stopped.
She was all alone.
"Now," Tory said. "I'm going to treat you to the biggest damn kick you ever had in your life. And when I'm finished-" She paused, and a smile that was almost a sneer distorted her mouth. "When I'm finished, then I'll show you what you have to do for me in return."
Linda suddenly saw the flaw in her thinking, the hole in the carefully-built train of logic which had led her to this moment. Dana's advice had been sound; she should have spent more time analyzing her new ideas, weighing them not only against the things she knew but also against the things which might come about as a result of her decision. If she'd given herself a few days to cool off, waited until the dual aches of lust and frustration had lost their edge, she might have realized in time the one defect in her plan to give up men forever and become a Lesbian.
But instead, she'd plunged right in without looking, and now she was stuck with the consequences of her deed.
Tory was bending over.
Tory's hands were palming her breasts.
It was a weird sensation. The touch of the girl's fingers wasn't physically much different from the caress of a man, but the fact that she was a girl, the fact that those fingers were female rather than male, seemed to change everything. Linda felt the twin fruits of her breasts molding deliciously against Tory's hands, felt the immediate and expected response of her nipples spreading and rising in her palms. But the pleasure was hollow; it thrilled her flesh, but it did not reach her mind. She felt an odd sense of detachment, as if her body no longer belonged to her.
She hoped that detachment would continue when the time came for her to pay the price of stupidity.
Tory manipulated her breasts madly. Her own breasts had settled against Linda's torso, and Linda was startled to feel how hard they were, how stony were the tight points of the nipples where they prodded her flesh.
Tory scooped Linda's right breast up and took the strawberry tip to her kiss.
This was also familiar, and at the same time different. Many mouths had kissed Linda's breasts, but they had all been the mouths of men. Now the lips of a woman were torturing her nipple, and it was not the same. Tory knew exactly how she could best thrill a girl's breasts-she was a girl herself, after all-and her caress brought to Linda's flesh a rich tingle of delight. But, as before, the delight was purely physical. Linda's body responded, but her mind remained unmoved.
Tory gave Linda's sweet boob quite a working over before she was done.
But it was only the beginning.
The redhead's lips began crawling down the naked length of Linda's body. She kissed her ribs, her waist, her hips, her navel, working inexorably onward.
Tory's hair tickled her flesh.
There was a moment of suspension, a moment without contact, as if there were no one on the bed with Linda, as if the whole thing had been only a nightmare from which she had just awakened.
One of Tory's hands dug possessively at a buttock. Her other hand reached back behind her and settled at one of Linda's breasts.
And her lips....
Linda felt the touch of Tory's trembling lips, and knew she had been mastered.
But the mastery was only physical. While Linda's body screamed with pleasure beneath Tory's triple caress, her mind watched the last piece of the puzzle fit into place.
She had been a fool to get mad at Jack over what had happened. Completely aside from the fact that it had been at least half her own fault, she could see now that what he'd said was true. When two people shared pleasure, there should be no reservations between them, nothing held back, nothing taboo. This was too important to be handled on a dishonest basis, and drawing arbitrary lines beyond which you would not go was the worst kind of dishonesty. She had been unfair with Jack; at any time in their relationship, she would have been glad to let him kiss her as Tory was kissing her now, would even have been selfish enough to allow his kiss to bring her to the ultimate moment of delight. And if she were willing to take that from him, then she should have been willing to give the same thing in return, without hesitation, without qualm.
She'd permitted her mind to override her instincts.
And this was what she had to show for it.
Tory's kiss was working fiercely. The end was in sight.
Linda felt the familiar signs, the spread of warm numbness which signaled the finale, but she didn't welcome it. As it happened, she took no pleasure at all.
Then, that was over.
Tory kissed her once more for good measure, then released her breast and buttock, and sat up.
"You liked that, didn't you? I could tell you really liked that, kid." Tory's lipstick was smeared.
For an instant, Linda considered running, leaping from the bed and bolting out of the room. But that wouldn't be any good. If she dodged her penance, if she failed to atone for her stupidity, she'd never be able to live with herself again. She couldn't leave this room without paying the price.
"Now," Tory said. "It's my turn." She slid down onto the sheets at Linda's side and slipped her hands in behind her neck. Her hard breasts drew up proudly. "You said before you didn't know what to do. Well, you know now. Just do the same things I did."
The flaw, Linda thought, the one thing she had never considered when she'd decided to try Lesbianism. Sure, the kiss of a woman's lips could produce almost the same pleasures as the kiss of a man's-and maybe, if that was all she had, she would come to be satisfied with it.
But what about repaying her lover? What would it be like when the time came to return all the caresses she had received?
Having love made to you was one thing-but making love yourself was something else again. Making love to a woman-
"Come on, kid," said Tory impatiently. "I don't feel like waiting. I want you right now."
Linda lifted herself on one elbow and stared down at Tory's bare breasts.
"Let's go," Tory said angrily. "You do what I tell you, or so help me God, I'll make you pay."
Linda put her hand over one of Tory's breasts.
The mound of flesh rose to her cupped palm.
"The other one," said Tory. "Use both hands."
Linda took both breasts in her hands. The nipples were hard as buttons.
"Don't just hold them, damn it-do something. Move them around. Pretend you're a man."
Linda massaged the lumps obediently, trying to recall the touches by which men had given her pleasure and duplicate them, trying at the same time to fight down the rising tide of disgust inside her.
"Good, good," Tory breathed. Her eyes were closed. "Now kiss them."
Linda's hand moved to bare a nipple. Her mouth came down and made a circle.
"Ah," said Tory darkly. "That's good. Keep that up. Yes ... now the other one ... there, that's perfect. More. Harder. That's the way. You're doing just fine...."
Linda's mouth-the mouth which had been designed to give pleasure to a man-was kissing a woman's breasts. The thought revolted her, but she didn't stop. She forced herself to go on, following Tory's instructions to the letter, knowing that the only way to purge her brain of poison was through this self-torture.
"All right," said Tory. Her voice had grown faint. "That's enough with the breasts. Now the rest." Her eyes had opened slightly into glittering slits. "You know what I'm talking about, kid? The way I did. All the way."
Linda did as she was told. She kissed Tory's body, moved her hands palm-down along the quivering torso, with her kiss following just behind them.
She touched the tops of Tory's legs. She glided her hands around Tory's hips, then under to grip the globed bottom.
Tory bent her knees. Tense hollows of muscle appeared, long shadowy indentations.
"Now," Tory said, over and over again, like an incantation. "Go, go!" Linda went.
And as she let the Lesbian world take her, she thought irrationally of the window of her room, and the fact that the shade was up, and the further fact that there was a building across the court.
Was anybody watching, she wondered? And, if so, what did they think of her?
The foulness swallowed her questions, and she stopped thinking entirely.
CHAPTER NINE
He was watching. He saw the entire thing.
He saw the slim, dark-haired girl and the redhead, the same two Lesbians he had watched the previous evening, saw them framed in the rectangle of that same window. They were both naked again, and were indulging themselves wildly in the same perverted lusts.
As before, the sight excited him, but his arousement lacked an essential ingredient. This time, he required more than simple stimulation.
This time, he needed an answer.
Some act or attitude of those two girls would, he felt sure, eventually trigger his memory and allow him to see the shape of the desire which was devouring him. Lesbians were part of the pattern. He was certain of it.
As he watched them, standing by his window, his clothing still open, his touch soothing his passion, he thought all at once of the blonde. Where was she? Would she appear tonight in her window? Or-a prospect he found even more exciting-would she perhaps join the Lesbians?
If she did, he felt a conviction that the sight of her participating in the Lesbian affair would clarify things in his mind once and for all.
Then, he saw her. She stepped through the door into the room.
She was naked; totally naked this time, without even a nightgown around her shoulders. Again he felt that strange twinge, which was two equal parts-present lust and memories of past excitement.
He waited breathlessly to see what would happen.
The two girls saw the blonde. They seemed surprised at her appearance. A conversation got underway. Presently, the redhead got out of bed and went over to the blonde; the other girl followed a moment later. Their conversation became more heated. An argument was developing between the dark-haired one and the redhead. The blonde stood and watched without speaking.
Suddenly, the redhead struck the dark-haired girl across the face. Her blow was swift and vicious; the girl's cheek went white for an instant, then red, and it was almost like a welt, he thought, something very close to a welt.
The argument continued for only a bit longer. Then the three girls left the room together.
He felt a pang of terrible disappointment. He had to see what they were going to do-they couldn't cheat him of his pleasure by hiding themselves. He glared across the court, attempting through the sheer force of his desire to will them back into the room.
When they reappeared, however, it was in the other room, the blonde's room. There were only two of them now-the dark-haired one was nowhere in sight.
The redhead and the blonde were talking. They were getting into bed together. They started to make love.
Without any warning, he had the answer.
All the bits and pieces-memory, association, lust and fulfillment, crime and punishment-fluttered down through his mind like vari-colored autumn leaves, and settled into a pattern.
The pattern.
He remembered now.
He recalled the time before it had started, the time before the welts.
He was a young man, finding his maturity with prostitutes, always professionals and never any other sort of girl, because only a tramp would allow him to follow his baser instincts. The women he purchased complained about him, became annoyed with the manner in which he vented his lusts.
He hurt them.
At first, not intentionally. At first, moving his body and hands to the rhythm of his own young passions, the hurt was purely accidental. He didn't actually want to hurt the girls, but he became carried away when the excitement was in him, and he hurt them anyway.
And, after a while, the hurt began to be a pleasure all by itself.
He bought a girl when he had to, he relieved himself on her, and in the process he hurt her. Some of the girls simply lay there and took it, and afterwards demanded extra payment for their discomfort. He was always willing to pay.
Sometimes, however, the girls would get angry or frightened, and try to fight him off, make him stop, call off the deal they had made. He liked it when the girls fought him, because it gave him the opportunity to fight them back, hurt them even more, bring himself that much additional pleasure.
He wondered frequently about the hurt, and why it made the delights of loving so much more intense for him. He couldn't understand it, but he could experience it, and he settled for that. The pattern.
The hookers, the lusts, the hurt, the gradual realization of what he needed ... Then ... the blonde.
He remembered her clearly now: a young girl, a pretty girl, a natural blonde, with fine round breasts and meaty buttocks and a limber torso."
He found her standing in a doorway one Saturday night. She told him frankly that she was for sale. And he was in the market to buy.
They went to her apartment, and she stripped for him, baring her body sensuously to his eyes. Her disrobing aroused him, and by the time he removed his own clothing, it wasn't necessary for her to do anything but spread herself on the bed, because he was as ready as any man could be.
She looked very soft and sweet. The prospect of hurting her appealed to him.
He sated his lusts quickly, driving insanely, beating her breasts furiously with his hands until the dancing spheres were almost as red and angry as their cherry tips. She made no protest; she simply compressed her mouth into a tight line, and waited for him to finish.
Afterward, she asked him for more money, in return for the painful privileges he had taken with her body.
He paid her without question, dressed himself, and left her apartment.
He had gotten no farther than a few blocks away, when he realized he had lost his keys. A moment's thought told him they had probably dropped from his pocket when he removed his trousers.
He went back to the girl's apartment.
Her door was open.
He entered without knocking.
She was still in the bedroom, still sprawled on her bed, body nude and glowing, just as she had been for him.
But there was someone else with her. A girl.
He made a sound of amazement, and they realized suddenly he was there. The girl with the blonde leaped from the bed with a cry of fear and scrambled for her clothing. She was a young thing, in her teens from the look of her; she had a slim, boyish body, with softly angular hips and very long legs. Her breasts were hard little apples with passion-stimulated stems.
"Baby-wait!" cried the blonde. She started to get up. The young girl was whimpering with fright; she pulled her plain cloth dress on over her head, stepped into a pair of sandals, grabbed her purse, and ran from the room all in one fluid motion, leaving her bra and panties behind her on the floor.
The front door had slammed before the blonde could stop her.
She turned to him with a look of hatred more intense than any he'd ever seen.
"You louse," she said tensely. "Now look what you've done."
"I came back for my keys," he said, confused. "What happened? What were you doing?"
The blonde sat down on the bed. She made no attempt to conceal her nudity from him. "I was having some fun for a change," she said. "Fat lot you'd care about that."
"Really," he said. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I only wanted my keys-and the door was open. I didn't think there'd be anybody here with you."
The blonde was rubbing her bare legs with her hands. She seemed to be controlling some deep agitation only through a tremendous effort. Her nipples were standing erect from the centers of her breasts.
"What were you doing?" he asked.
"I told you-having some fun."
"With a girl?"
She curled her lip. "Of course, with a girl. You don't think I could have any fun with a man, do you?"
"With a girl," he repeated. "You're a-" He groped for an unfamiliar word.
"I'm a Lesbian," she said calmly.
"A Lesbian." His voice was filled with awe.
The blonde slung her legs up onto the bed and stretched out full-length, presenting him with a shocking view of her anatomy.
"The show's over," she said. "Go away."
"No, wait. I want to ask you something." He passed a hand over his eyes, trying to collect his thoughts. There was a new idea somewhere in his head, and he needed time to pin it down.
"Get out of here," said the blonde. "Go to hell."
He dropped his hand and looked at her.
His eyes popped open wide.
She was touching herself. One of her hands held a breast. The other caressed her legs.
She was doing something to herself, and the sight stopped him cold. He went over to the bed and stared at her until she noticed him.
"Will you leave me alone," she said loudly.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm letting off steam, you stupid louse. You interrupted me right in the middle of a session-and once I get worked up like that, I can't just turn off." She made an impatient sound with her mouth. "Now take your keys and beat it, for God's sake. You got your money's worth. I want some privacy."
"Do you ... do this often?" he asked, not moving.
"Sometimes," she said. "After a sale, usually." Her voice was growing a bit dreamy. She squeezed her own breast, and shivered. Her other hand was also busy.
"After a sale," he said. "You mean, after having a man?"
"That's right."
"But why? Don't men satisfy you?"
"No," she said. "I told you already. I don't get any kick from a man."
"I see," he said, nodding. "So you satisfy yourself this way."
"Only when I can't get a woman," she said.
The new idea was blooming in his brain, like a flower of evil. "You hate men?" he asked excitedly.
"Yes." Her eyes were closing, and her face was growing flushed as the excitement flooded her. "I hate men. Men are animals. They make me sick."
Something snapped inside him.
A Lesbian-a woman who despised men, but who was forced to sell her body to men in order to earn her living. To such a woman, loving wasn't a pleasure at all.
It was a pain.
But it was apparently a pain she could live with, as long as she was being paid for her troubles. He could understand how she might make such an adjustment.
But what would happen if a man didn't pay her? How would she feel if a man took her against her will, raped her, beat her, used her violently, and paid her nothing?
How great would her pain be then?
With a sudden total comprehension, he realized that this blonde Lesbian was a perfect victim for his lusts, the victim he had been waiting for all his life. She was a logical target for pain of the kind he revelled in giving, but any pain he inflicted on her would transcend the physical, be magnified by the agony of her mind, blown up all out of proportion by the fact that she would hate not only the pain itself but also the man who was making her suffer it.
His passion had returned, greater than before, as if it had never been satisfied. And so it hadn't-he could see that now. Never in his experience had he ben satisfied completely.
But he would be.
The ultimate in pleasure was on the bed before him.
He opened his clothing quickly. The blonde heard the sounds and saw what he was doing. A look of revulsion crossed her face.
"Get out of here!" she yelled. "You're not getting to me-I don't care how much you're willing to pay."
He was ready. His desires had never seemed more lethal. He trembled as the power coursed through his veins.
He reached down and wrenched the blonde's hand away. She tried to fend him off, but the power was strong in him now; he launched himself to her, pinning her to the bed. Her legs shifted, attempting to get away, but she couldn't manage it.
She bared her teeth in a snarl of frustration and rage.
He claimed her.
She thrashed madly, yelling at the top of her lungs, calling him names so foul that he didn't recognize half of them. But he loved the sound of her voice, the white glitter of her teeth, the soft, struggling masses of her body against him.
"Get away," she cried. "You cruddy...."
He hit her with his hand.
The blow shocked her into silence for an instant. A genuine fear suddenly filled her eyes. Then she began screaming.
It was a sound like the thunder of a symphony orchestra in his ears. Her screaming thrilled him to the core, and he hit her again and again, hit her with his fist, hit her until blood was drooling from her nose, until both her eyes were blackened, until her screams were bright with anguish.
His lust spent itself, then rose again, demanding more, more....
He hit her until his hands became numb, until the muscles of his arms were heavy as lead. At length, he was forced to stop.
She was only half-conscious. Her head lolled from side to side on the blood-stained sheets. Bubbles of saliva were at the corners of her lips.
He looked at his useless hands. He couldn't stop now-not in the midst of such pleasure. There was something magnificent waiting for him, and he would never reach it if he stopped now....
An inspiration struck him, and he whipped off his belt.
Still kneeling, still pummeling, supporting himself with one hand, he began to use the belt.
It made a vicious slapping sound when it cracked across her breasts, and that sound was almost as beautiful as her screaming, and he struck her breasts with the belt again and again, watching with delight as the soft spheres quivered and bounded, as the taut pink coins of the nipples grew progressively darker, angrier-
And then there was a stripe across her breasts, a mark of some kind appearing on her flesh, and he stopped, catching the belt in mid-swing, stopped to stare at this new strange thing, this track of pain imprinted on her vulnerable loveliness....
A welt.
A red welt.
Hit a woman, and you give her pain, but the pain soon fades, and all your work is forgotten, and it's as if you never did anything to the woman at all....
But hit a woman hard enough to leave a welt, and your act will be remembered.
A welt is like a signature.
It says: Pain was here.
The concept intoxicated him. He began hitting her again, bringing the hard leather against her flesh in a fury of delight. He striped her breasts with welts until there were no unmarked areas left, until all the welts had run together and her breasts were shuddering bladders of redness. Her torment blossomed crimson under his belt, and the thrill of it almost tore him apart, but still it wasn't quite enough....
He leaped off the bed. It was no longer necessary to feed his excitement with contact; the excitement fed itself. He stood over her, and the belt rose and fell, rose and fell, leaving ripe welts across her torso, her waist, her legs, even her face-everywhere. First the belt and then the welt and pain for her, and fantastic pleasure for him.
But even that wasn't enough. The welts were bright and beautiful, but they would fade with time. Eventually, the red stripes would heal, and her flesh would whiten, and all the pain would be forgotten....
The welts must be made deeper, made deeply enough so that they could never fade, so they could endure on her flesh forever.
He needed something. His arm dropped, his fingers opened, the belt fell to the floor. He stared around, looking for what he needed.
The blonde whined softly on the bed.
He left her bedroom and went to the kitchen. In a drawer he found a carving knife. But it was old, nicked, its edge dulled with use. It was no good for his purpose.
He left her kitchen and went to the bathroom.
He found what he needed in the medicine chest. He had no idea why she would have such an object, but there it was anyway, slender and gleaming, fitting in his palm as if it had belonged there from the beginning of time.
A straight-razor.
He returned to her bedroom.
She was still lying semi-conscious, still whimpering. The welts were beginning to fade already; patches of white skin were appearing on her breasts.
He went to work on those first.
How perfect it was. He drew a line, and there was a welt, thin as crimson thread at first, but then spreading, spreading, as red blood welled.
His intestines boiled as he drew a second line.
Then a third.
The blood ran down her sides onto the bed. The sheets soaked it up greedily.
When her breasts were thoroughly ruined, he went on down her torso, drawing line after line, perfectly parallel, watching the indelible marks appear as if by magic. The passion raged in him, blinding his senses, and he didn't realize the blonde had been screaming until she stopped.
The razor slashed on. The welts were so numerous he couldn't begin to count them. The pleasure was so devouring it felt like death itself....
Death-wasn't that pain's ultimate mark, the one that could never heal, never fade?
The blonde's shapely body had been reduced to ribbons when he felt the hands suddenly grab him.
Her screaming had been heard, and the room was filled with people, and eyes were staring at the bed, and then at him, and mouths were open, and voices were calling at him ... monster ... fiend....
Murderer....
They took him somewhere.
Men in uniforms asked him questions, and he tried to answer them, and they beat him, and then asked more questions, and beat him again, hit him with something hard, something made of rubber, something that left welts all over his body, and his mind screamed for them to stop, because they were inflicting pain upon him, because they were marking him with welts, and that was wrong-it was supposed to be the other way, he was the one who gave the gift of welts, not received them, that was all wrong, but when he tried to explain that, they just beat him more furiously.
Later, he awakened to welts, perfectly parallel bands of red above him, menacing him, and though a part of his mind realized he was seeing nothing more than the crimsoned sunset sky through a barred window, he screamed anyway, screamed because the stripes of red looked like welts.
Then there was a man, some kind of doctor. They talked together, and he tried to explain to the doctor about the welts, but the doctor just couldn't understand.
And they took him away, and put him in a room with bars on the windows and a heavy iron door, and every night at sunset when he saw the welts between the bars and began to scream, they would come and put some sort of garment on him so he couldn't move, they would hold him helpless until the sun was down and there were no more welts. But the thing they put on him left welts-real welts-and that would set him screaming again, and there would be more horror, more pain....
How long had it lasted?
He couldn't remember.
How had he escaped it?
He couldn't remember that, either.
But he had escaped it, gotten somehow out of the room, out of the building and into the darkness of the night, and they had followed him, and he had felt the focus of their attention like a glaring spotlight behind him.
But he eluded them.
That had been ten years ago.
All that time, he'd stayed by himself, avoiding people, avoiding women especially, vowing that he would never attract attention to himself again. He'd discovered the books and pictures, devised ways to keep his lusts in check, and had remained safe. The genie had been bottled, the past gradually had faded, and was forgotten.
Until now.
Now, standing at the window of his bedroom, watching the blonde and the redhead performing their lesbian play, all the old furies were alive in him again.
The blonde....
He would have her.
The redhead, too, if necessary-but the blonde first.
And it would be just as beautiful as it had been that time ten years ago, and maybe even more beautiful. Staring at the girl, he had a bright vision of her flesh in tatters, of her soft breasts yielding to the kiss of his razor ... , Razor.
He turned from the window and went to the bathroom. He pulled open the medicine chest and pawed everything into the sink, running his hands along the empty shelves until he was sure the weapon he needed was not there.
He had to have a razor, a straight-razor, honed and gleaming-just as he had that other time. If he could get such a razor and go to that blonde, then everything would be perfect.
He remembered the drug store on the corner. A drug store sold razors, he thought, he would be able to buy one there.
He flung the door of the medicine chest closed, adjusted his clothing, then examined himself in the mirror. He tried to arrange his features into a calm expression; it was difficult, but finally he was satisfied. If he kept his face still, he could make it to and from the drug store without drawing any attention to himself.
Burning with anticipation, he left the bathroom, left the apartment, without once looking back at the thing in the tub.
CHAPTER TEN
Linda finished with the redhead.
She left her laughing on the bed, ran to the bathroom, and became ill. The sickness was even greater than the one she'd experienced after the accident with Jack.
When her stomach had brought up all its contents, she reeled out of the bathroom and down the hall. Dana's room was empty as she passed it, and the living room was also empty. She didn't know where Dana was, and didn't care.
She got into her clothes as quickly as she could, wanting desperately to be out of the apartment before Tory revived from the pleasure and came looking for her. She couldn't bear to look at the redhead again. She wondered if she would ever be able to see a woman's naked body without remembering the sickness and horror of this evening.
She buttoned the neck of her blouse, smoothed her hands down over her skirt, then turned to leave.
"Hey, Linda, baby," called Tory from the bedroom.
Linda yanked open the door and hurried down the corridor toward the stairs. Tory couldn't follow her; the redhead was still naked, and by the time she put on her clothes, Linda would be clear of the building.
Linda wondered where she would go. Not that it mattered-anywhere would be all right, as long as it was away from here. There was some money in her purse; she could spend the night at a hotel somewhere, and then go looking for a new apartment tomorrow-a single apartment, with no one in it but herself.
No more roommates, unless they were men.
She thought of Jack as she started down the stairs. Did she want to see him again? She wasn't sure. If she did see him, would she tell him what had happened, explain the reasons behind her strange behavior? She wondered if she would ever have courage enough to tell anyone her story. She wondered if Jack, or any man, could understand.
Well-that was in the future. Right now, the thing to do was get out of this rotten building, away from the insanity, go to some place calm and safe where the wounds in her mind could heal themselves.
She came around the second-floor landing to the head of the steps.
There was a man coming up toward her.
She stopped, her hand on the bannister, her entire body stiff. The light in the stairwell glittered off the object he held in his hand.
A straight-razor-opened, its keen edge turned toward her.
Fear exploded in her brain, but it wasn't the sight of the razor that made her afraid-it was the expression on the man's face. She had seen an expression like that only a few minutes earlier, on the face of Tory.
It was the look of a human being driven beyond the brink of reason.
She had never seen the man before, she had no idea who he might be, but she could read the state of his mind as clearly as if his head had been transparent. The razor simply underscored what she already knew.
She screamed.
He bolted up the last few steps separating them and swung his razor-hand at her. The cruel blade whistled past her face, missing it by less than an inch. His fist, following through, struck her across the line of her jaw, snapping her head to one side.
Her vision went gray for an instant, and she felt her knees buckle under her. She sat down heavily, her buttocks on the landing, her feet on the second step down.
He struck out again, but the razor had somehow become turned around in his hand, and only the dull edge of it struck her skin. Once more, his fist was right behind the blade; the blow was even more vicious this time.
She tried to keep her balance, but it was impossible, the hallway tilted, and suddenly she was on her back. Her feet still rested on the step; her knees were raised, her skirt had slid all the way down her thighs to her panties.
She screamed again, but it was a weak sound. Her senses fluttered at the edge of unconsciousness. She knew the man was mad, she knew he had a razor, she knew he probably intended to slash her with that razor, mutilate her, perhaps even kill her, but there was nothing she could do about it. All feeling had gone out of her limbs; she was numb, dazed, helpless there on the landing.
And the madman's hands were upon her.
She waited for the cold bite of the razor to open her flesh. And she thought: Is this a punishment? Is this the final price I must pay for my stupidity? If I hadn't been a fool with Jack, I never would have gone with Tory tonight, I wouldn't even be in this building right now, and all this wouldn't be happening.
The pattern of her decisions had led her to this moment, and now she was going to pay. First mutilation, then death....
She felt the razor touch one of her naked legs.
His hands were gripping her legs. She could feel the moisture of his palms, feel each of his fingers as a separate pressure. There was no room in his hands for the razor; they were filled completely.
She felt him fling her skirt up over her breasts. She felt him skin off her panties. His hands gripped again, hurting.
She felt the touch again.
It brought her halfway out of her fog, and she opened her eyes to see him, the razor high above his head. In another instant....
I'm sorry, she thought.
Then there was an impact, and she tensed herself, awaiting the pain. The pain didn't come.
Instead, she felt a sudden flurry of movement above her, and heard a thumping of bodies. A voice she didn't recognize said one strangled word: "Welts...." Then the voice trailed off into a thin scream, which receded down the stairs away from her-and ended in a heavy thud somewhere below.
Another voice said her name: "Linda."
It was a voice she knew very well.
"Jack," she said.
His arms came around her, and she stopped fighting, yielded her mind up to the darkness of unconsciousness, knowing she was safe.
She spent the remainder of the night in Jack's apartment, sleeping in his bed while he sat on a chair beside her, standing guard. A few times she awakened frightened, but he was always right there, ready to comfort her.
The night passed, and in the morning the horrors no longer seemed real.
She woke up to find him bending over her, smiling. "Hi, sweetheart," he said. "How do you feel?"
"All right, I guess." She felt a slight edge of panic still cutting into her brain.
Apparently it showed in her face, because he said, ."Take it easy, baby. It's all right. The police have him now-he can't hurt anybody any more."
"God," she said. "Who was he? What happened?"
"A maniac-called himself Thornton, although that's probably not his right name." Jack sat down on the edge of the bed, lit two cigarettes, and passed one to Linda. She drew on it gratefully.
"What was he doing in my building?" she asked. "I didn't recognize him."
"He lived in the building across the way from yours. Had a back apartment that faced your rear windows. They found the address in his wallet after taking him into custody." He made a face. "There was a body in his bathtub. He murdered a woman."
Linda shivered.
"They think he's an escaped lunatic," Jack went on. "They've been looking for a man of his description for almost ten years now. If he's the same man, he was originally sent up for committing the same kind of crime he tried on you-rape and murder."
She shivered again.
"At any rate, he's out of circulation now, and you don't have to worry about him. The police will want you to come downtown and identify him, of course, but they'll wait until you feel up to it. I saw to that."
"Jack, you saved me from him, didn't you?"
He shrugged. "I was lucky, that's all."
"But what were you doing there? I thought you'd gone home after you dropped me off."
"No, I hung around for a while. Something about the way you were acting-I don't know-I had a funny feeling things were cockeyed. So I just sat in the car for a while to think. Then your roommate came down."
Linda's eyes widened. "Dana? You saw her?"
"Uh-huh. I recognized her from your description when she came out of the building. At first, I wasn't going to say anything to her, but she was acting oddly excited, and I thought it might be connected with you. So I called her over to the car, told her who I was, and asked her what was wrong."
Linda closed her eyes. "Did she tell you?"
"Yes," Jack said. "She told me the whole thing-that you'd somehow gotten the idea you wanted to try Lesbianism, that you were up in the apartment that very moment with one of her nutty friends. She and I talked for quite a while, trying to decide what to do about you."
"Do about me?"
"Well, sure. Your roommate had enough sense to know you weren't really a Lesbian. That's why she'd never made a pass at you all the time you were living together. She wanted very much to keep you from hurting yourself, but she couldn't figure out any way to do it. That's what we were talking about when I heard you screaming."
"I see," she said. She couldn't look at him.
"Afterward, when I went outside to get a cop, she was gone. I don't know where she went." He puffed on his cigarette for a moment. "She really was worried about you, Linda. If you have a single friend in the world, it's your roommate."
"She's not my roommate any more," Linda said. "I'm not going back there."
"Whatever you say."
Linda finally found courage enough to turn her head and meet Jack's eyes. "You must be disgusted with me," she said.
"No, I'm not," he replied thoughtfully. "I didn't feel disgusted last night, and I don't now. I just feel sad, because it was my fault."
"Your fault?"
"Certainly. Things like Lesbianism happen to people because other people have done something to hurt them. As soon as I learned what you were doing, I thought of the other night, and the accident we had. And I could see right away how that could have turned you off men."
"I was stupid," she said. "I should have known in advance what would happen-and I should have just let it happen. As you said, there wasn't anything wrong. It was only part of loving, that's all."
"True," he said. "But we went too fast, baby. You weren't quite ready to go that far with me. It would have been better if I'd led you gradually. And that was my fault-this whole simple-minded business was my fault."
She shook her head in amazement. "And you don't hate me for being a Lesbian?"
"Are you a Lesbian?"
"I don't know."
"Tell me, Linda-did you and your roommate's crazy friend love last night?"
"Yes," she said aloud. "The girl did things to your body-right?"
"Yes."
"Did you enjoy them?"
Linda paused. "Yes," she said faintly.
Jack's face remained expressionless. "Uh-huh. Now let me ask you this: did you enjoy that girl's caresses primarily because she was a girl, or just because the things she did excited you physically?"
"I enjoyed what she did-but I hated the idea that she was a woman."
"Fine," Jack said. "One more question: When you touched her, did you get any pleasure out of it?"
"No," she said quickly. "I hated it."
He nodded. "Look, Linda, the fact that you wanted to love a girl last night doesn't mean you're a Lesbian. You were simply on the rebound from a painful experience. What happened between you and that girl adds up to only one thing, as far as I'm concerned."
"What?"
"That I wasn't satisfying you."
She began to protest, but he cut her off.
"It's true, Linda. If you'd been getting everything you needed from me, you wouldn't have gone to a girl. There'd be no reason for it."
"Maybe you're right," she said. "But it's at least half my fault that things weren't more honest between us."
He grinned. "Honest-that's my word."
"I know what it means now."
He leaned forward. "I haven't treated you very well, Linda. I'd like to try to make it up to you-if you'll let me."
She looked into his face, and felt a stirring. It was an old, familiar sensation, but it was also new, as if she'd never really felt it before.
Honesty, she thought.
People must be honest with other people about what they want, and they should be just as honest with themselves.
"Jack?"
"Yes, baby?"
"Make love to me."
He blinked. "Of course, sweetheart. Whenever you say the word."
"Now?"
"Now?"
"Right now. Right this minute."
"Baby, are you sure you feel up to it? You've had a rough time."
"I want you," she said. "I need you more now than I've ever needed anything in my life."
He rose from the bed and began to remove his clothing.
She moved her shoulders, and suddenly the coverlet had fallen away from her and she felt the morning air on her naked breasts. She rubbed her legs together, and realized she was entirely nude. He had brought her here the night before, had stripped her bare and put her to bed, and hadn't once laid a hand on her. He'd controlled his urges in order to nurse her tenderly through the night.
All at once, she wanted him terribly. She wanted him loving her, making the world right for her again. He was a symbol of all the things she'd almost lost. And he was there, standing beside her, and so perhaps those things were not lost to her after all.
The last of his clothing came off. He was nude.
She raised her arms to him, letting the coverlet slide all the way down.
He moved onto the bed and kissed her. His lips were gentle.
"Now, Jack," she said huskily. "Right now."
"Linda," he said. She had never heard her name spoken with such intensity.
Then his hands had found her breasts, and his lips were kissing her nipples, making them grow red as berries, hard as thrusting fingers. His hands smoothed down the front of her body, caressing her soft waist, lingering at the hollow of her navel. She felt his fingertips touch her buttocks, and the fire of passion flared for her.
He kissed her with mounting desire, stroking her buttocks, palming her breasts. His excitement grew-she knew-and her own excitement kept pace.
And then, she couldn't wait any longer. Her body ached for him, hungered for him.
She looped her arms around his waist and pulled him to her.
They started the warm, thrilling sensation.
His face was buried in the crook of her shoulder, his hands were still cupped over her breasts.
This is the way things should be, she thought, I should have seen that all along. You can't give just part of yourself to another person; you have to give all, or nothing. Once you make up your mind to do that, you'll never have to want for anything again.
Linda had finally made up her mind completely.
They bounded and romped on the bed until the finish. Afterward, they smoked cigarettes and talked for a while, until the closeness of their naked bodies had rekindled their desire.
They started again, and the second time lasted much longer, and was that much better.
They stayed in bed all afternoon, exploring each other's bodies, finding new pleasures to give and receive, being completely honest at last. And eventually, Linda found herself over him, reversed. She kissed him-a long, lingering kiss.
While he did the same.
And it happened again, just as it had happened before.
But this time, she didn't mind it at all.
Elsewhere in the city, the last rays of the setting sun lanced out of the west to touch a barred window, painting the iron bars with red light.
Inside the window, someone began screaming.
And he continued to scream long after the last glow of sunset had been swallowed in the darkness of night.
