"I'm sorry, Wally. I can't come back Monday. I wouldn't be able to work."
The hand was withdrawn from his shoulder. The two men moved out onto the front steps.
"I'll tell Maclary. I can't extend your leave of absence ó only Maclary can do that. Want me to set up an appointment for you to talk to him?"
"All right."
"Monday morning, eleven o'clock?" He chuckled. "Drag it out an hour and maybe he'll invite you to lunch."
"All right."
A pat on the shoulder and then Wally was moving rapidly down the steps across the flagstone toward his car. He opened the door and waved, that peculiar half-salute gesture he sometimes used. "Take it easy, Clark. Stop by the office and see me sometime Monday."
"All right." He stuffed his hands in his pockets and watched the car as it moved down the driveway and onto the street. The tires were audible on the film of street water ... the car turned the corner ...
* * *
There were no obtrusive sounds in the city. No kids were out playing on the damp grass. Lights in most of the houses. Now the neighborhood had settled down to its nightly TV, gradual relaxation leading to its oblivion of sleep.
Tomorrow morning the kids would return with their raucousness. The world was turning slowly beneath him and as he stood there ó looking at the shadows of houses, the city, the world ó he felt acutely aware of the city and the world stretching away from his sole position. Somewhere out there in the city there was a woman he would fuck. He didn't know her ó probably ó but they would become well acquainted tonight when he stuck his cock in her. He had a whole month's sexual energy in store for her. And ... somewhere in the city ó or perhaps beyond the city ó there was a man he would kill. He didn't know that man either but someday they would become well acquainted. The .22 would kill him. Not the first slug, perhaps not the first few but the total of ten striking in a tight circle of the man's heart or stomach would kill him!
He threw his cigarette out on the lawn and watched the fiery arc. He inhaled deeply and the fresh damp air was soothing. Stephenson hadn't mentioned Alma ... And Stephenson had changed. Admitting the model plant blunder was entirely new. He'd never heard Stephenson admit any mistake before.
Stephenson seemed more humble, as if a month had worn off some of his rough edges. Or ó Stephenson had stood by Alma's grave also. Perhaps Alma's death had changed Stephenson.
"Clark?" Beatrice was standing on the lawn near the steps, looking up at him. She had moved silently across the lawn from her house.
He looked down at her but could think of nothing to say. There were important things to be done. One, shave. Two, phone Sid Weinman. Three, get a woman ...
"Want to see our balcony, Clark? Paul finished it today."
He turned to face her and his lips parted to say No, but then he remembered the time he'd fucked her. Everything had fallen exactly right then. That one instance they had been alone long enough to make it. Since then they had never been alone. Since then Alma had always been with him or else Paul had always been with her. He glanced at the driveway of the adjoining house and saw Paul's station wagon was gone. That meant she was alone in the house ...
She could be the woman.
CHAPTER TEN
"I'm taking care of Bobby and Judy," Beatrice explained. "You know Pete and Rosina won a week's vacation in Florida. They didn't want to go ... said what would a week in Florida be with two kids ... said they might as well go to Ocean City, New Jersey. I said it was foolish- not to take it since it was free and I volunteered to take care of the kids. My big mouth again."
She shrugged her shoulders. They were moving across her front porch and she gestured with a finger across her lips. "Don't talk too loud. Rosina says they wake up if a mouse trips. And I always thought kids slept like logs!"
They moved silently through the house and up the flight of stairs. He noticed that each room only had one light on with the result that the house was semi-illuminated. He remembered that Paul and Beatrice had planned the balcony as long ago as last summer; he remembered the sketch Paul had drawn on a piece of paper on their picnic table.
"Here it is. Our pride and joy." Beatrice turned on a light.
He glanced at the aluminum plastic-webbed chairs, the small round table, the potted plants, the chaise lounge, the awnings that stretched above the screened windows. "Paul did a hell of a good job," he muttered.
"The breeze up here is wonderful. Feel it?"
He could feel the breeze against his face and chest. He lit a cigarette and turned toward Beatrice. She was wearing a tan linen dress that hugged the curves of her body. He looked at her long curving legs and remembered how it had been ...
She turned off the light. "We don't really need the light," she explained.
"And, with the light, up this high, you feel as if you're on a stage! Have a seat, Clark. Paul went out to get some ice cream. We wanted to ask you over to see the balcony but we saw you had company, so Paul said to ask you to come over if your company left while he was getting the ice cream. He's so darn proud of this balcony ... you might think he'd designed a whole plant or something the way you do on your job."
Clark walked across the balcony and looked down at the lawn and rows of shrubs, the white picket fence that divided Paul's property from their neighbor's. Desire swelled in his loins. He turned away from the screened window and saw Beatrice in the faint glow of moonlight on the balcony. She was sitting in one of the plastic-webbed chairs, her legs crossed. He stared at the soft and curving flesh of her legs and the desire in his cock was undeniable.
She gasped when he pulled her up from the chair and crushed her body against his. He ended the gasp by pressing his mouth tightly against hers. He felt the roundness of her breasts flattened against his chest and he kept one arm around her shoulders to hold the upper portion of her body against him while he moved his other arm down ó cupping her buttocks with a hand and pulling the lower portion of her body against him until he felt the pressure of her stomach and thighs and loins against his own body. She twisted an arm behind her in a futile attempt to remove the hand from her buttocks ó and managed to twist her mouth away from his.
"No. Clark! No!" She had thought she was safe from anything such as this ó safe because Paul would return soon; safe because Rosina's children were in the house and, in a sense, they were not alone. Paul didn't have the slightest idea he'd attempt anything such as this ó or else he wouldn't have suggested Beatrice invite Clark over while he was away ...
"I need you, Beatrice. I want you, I need you so much, I ó"
"No, no, no! Please, Clark ... " She began crying. His cock ached with the growing desire for her.
He thought, We made love before. Why not now? There will be time before Paul returns. But he knew it would be best not to use words, best to simply force himself upon her and, once he had taken her, there would be no turning back, she couldn't tell Paul. She had kept the secret of their previous lovemaking. Now she would have another lovemaking to keep secret.
In her attempt to escape him, she retreated against the brick wall of the house that served as the interior wall of the balcony. He held her there with the pressure of his body and slid his hands up beneath her skirt. He grasped the waistband of her panties and began pulling them down. She stopped fighting. One of her arms' dangled helplessly and she held the small fist of a hand against her open mouth as if to suffocate her sobbing.
As he pulled her panties down the length of her thighs, his knuckles brushed the furry patch of her cunt and with a new urgency to his lust, he unzippered his fly and drew his cock free of his clothing. He raised the front of her skirt to her waist and held it there while he stepped forward, the moonlight clearly showing the triangular target ... The tip of his manhood touched the triangular target. He slid the tip through the hair to crush into the soft warm crevice of her cunt ... It wasn't working. He managed to get the head of his cock between her labia and the moist velvety f
lesh felt maddeningly good but he could not get into her vagina. She was standing wrong, or he was standing wrong ó it was hard to tell.
He slid his glands back and forth between her cunt lips and heard himself moaning softly. God. A whole month without a woman. He had not really thought about fucking until today but now, with his cock brushing against Beatrice's soft cunt, he felt as if he had a mountain of come in his balls and it would burst like a landslide at the slightest touch.
Something else was wrong. Beatrice was crying, shifting her position as she tried to keep him from shoving into her while he still kept her pinned to the wall. His prick skidded away from her cunt and between the round columns of her soft thighs. He jerked his cock back and forth, crazily enjoying even the slight pressure of her thighs on each side of his achingly hard shaft. A kind of madness gripped him and he placed his hands on her waist, jerking his cock between her two curved thighs, thinking with a pure madness that he would fuck her thighs that way and spurt his come against the wall behind her.
"Paul's coming back!"
He heard the slam of the car door. Paul's footsteps on the driveway. Soft whistling. But Clark's hips and his prick were independent of his mind. A month's gathered lust had severed all the strings. He kept on fucking her soft thighs until she frantically shoved against his chest. He stumbled backward and felt, in that moment of separation, his cock spurting a long steady stream of come into the darkness.
His breathing was ragged and he could hear Beatrice sobbing. He turned and shoved his manhood in his pants, zipping up the fly, only partly aware that a cloud must have passed before the moon because the whole balcony had suddenly turned black. He groped through the darkness until he felt a chair, dropped into it. He heard the scrape of another chair as Beatrice settled into it ... heard Beatrice's sobbing gradually subside and die.
"Beatrice?" Paul's voice calling from the first floor. "Beatrice?" The muffled sound of his footsteps on the carpeted stairs.
"Hi, Clark. Did Beatrice give you the grand tour? How do you like it?" A wind thousands of feet in the sky had moved the cloud away from the moon.
The faint moonlight had returned to the balcony.
"Great job of engineering." His voice was too husky. He tried to correct it as he added, "You've qualified as an engineer for the firm."
"Chocolate and vanilla, Beatrice. That's all they had. I put it in the freezer."
Clark felt his heartbeat slow and he reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Beads of sweat were trickling down his cheeks, itching the stubble of beard. The balcony was a dimly lighted stage and he watched the actors as they moved through their roles. The actor named Paul sat in one of the chairs and lit his pipe, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
The actress named Beatrice remained in her chair, but her shoulders suddenly hunched and she began to make a strange soft sound.
The actor named Paul had been talking. Meaningless words concerning the meaningless balcony. But he stopped when the soft sounds became a harsh sobbing ... "Beatrice? What's wrong, honey?"
"Ooooo."
"Beatrice? Are you sick?"
Clark watched as Paul rushed to turn on the light and knelt before his wife.
He kept talking to her and stopped abruptly, grasping her chin with a hand and turning her face toward the light. Tears glided down the smoothness of her cheeks but the light also showed the smear of lipstick from her lips ...
Beatrice's hands were twisting a small handkerchief in her lap. Paul looked down at her hands and, with an animal grunt, pulled her hands away from her lap, staring.
Clark felt a chill at the base of his spine. A cloud had passed before the moon. The balcony had grown dark. In the darkness, he had blindly and uncontrollably spurted his come. At that same moment, Beatrice had shoved him away. Her skirt must have fallen down at the precise instant of his spurting. She held in her lap, on the tan linen dress, a large pool of his come. She had been trying to soak it up into the small handkerchief ó working futilely, the handkerchief was filled with the white substance.
"What the hell's been going on here?" Paul screamed.
"Ooooo."
"Beatrice!" Paul grasped her shoulders and shook her.
"It was all my fault," Clark heard himself say.
"I'll break your goddamned neck!"
Clark tensed as Paul came toward him. He eased his right hand in his pocket and touched the gun.
"No! We didn't do anything! We ó" Beatrice hurried between them and clung to her husband. Her words were drowned in sobs for a while but she struggled to overcome the sobbing and only fragments of her sentences were understandable. "All mixed up - only kissed me - tried to - but he couldn't - I fought - must believe me."
Paul held his wife while she sobbed against his chest. "Clark, get out of this house before I kill you."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He found Elaine Bettinger in the Accounting Department. It was strange to see her at a different desk. There were two other girls in the office. He didn't know them and they didn't know him. They only glanced at him and then returned to their work.
There was a small span of silence before Elaine turned and saw him. That span seemed frozen as if the world were deliberately standing still for him so he. could study her ... The soft red lips that always curved in a teasing half-smile whenever she asked a question ... The slender red-tipped hands, softer than any other woman's hands ó much softer than Alma's ... The tall, slender length of her body ... The long lovely legs so beautifully encased in nylon ... The dark eyes that had occasionally flashed with that inner heat ...
He remembered those moments in the stairwell with her and the times in his office when they had locked the door and played with each other ... The details of the times she had perched on the edge of his desk were indelibly stamped into his memory and the smallest details would be as sharp in His mind fifty years from now as they had been a moment after the happening ...
Elaine sitting there with her skirt up around her hips, her nyloned legs parted. His hand between the creamy smooth thighs and one of his fingers beneath the elastic band of her panties, that finger in her cunt. That finger encircled by warmness and softness and moistness, that finger gripped by her vagina. Sliding the finger back and forth, it had been lubricated by the sweet oily substance of her joy and the sliding had become easier and easier although her vagina had gripped his finger tighter and tighter. He had felt the rhythmic pulsings against and around his finger and it had been a strange but remarkable experience to stand there and watch her beautiful body quiver with her pleasure. Her body fully clothed in the sense that she still wore her skirt and blouse, panties and bra, garter belt and nylons and high-heel shoes; but naked in the sense that her womanhood was exposed to his touch and his gaze.
It had been equally strange and remarkable those times he had knelt before her and she had gripped his cock with her soft hands ó squeezing and jerking on it while she waited for the flow of male fluid. Equally unforgettable to have seen her there, kneeling before him ó beautiful and desirable ó wanting more than anything else in the world to sink his rod into her but forcing himself to accept her substitute for sexual intercourse.
During those first weeks and months when she was his secretary, he had told her he wanted her completely and had tried to make arrangements so they could meet after working hours, but she had never agreed to going further than the "playing." As Bill Medkeff had explained, she didn't want a lover or an affair, she wanted only the excitement of teasing and playing. She was something special. Elaine Bettinger was not like the millions of women who would take another man ó she was balanced somewhere in-between, a woman on a delicious fence by having the excitement of other men feeling her and wanting her, and yet still having the clear conscience of being loyal to her husband.
She was like Bonnie McCreary, he realized. Little Bonnie McCreary who'd dated boys and allowed them to play with her pussy at the drive-in t
heaters while she played with them ó Little Bonnie McCreary who'd always said no until one night she'd fallen off the fence ó either because one of the boys had not been able to resist the temptation to forcibly shove his prick into her, or because she had eventually been overcome by her own curiosity or desire. In any event, Bonnie McCreary had fallen off the fence that Elaine was on. Little Bonnie had started screwing as avidly as she had played ...
Although he couldn't understand the reason for Elaine's fence riding ó her seeming illogic of being willing to take a man's penis in her hand but not to receive it in her vagina ó he had long ago reconciled himself to her peculiarities. Her peculiarities were not as drastic as the ones of the Go-Go girl in that bar, and in the tick of a microsecond, the memories flashed through his mind how Ed and he had spent half the night drinking and watching the Go-Go girl's gyrations on the stage. Finally the girl had headed toward one of the back rooms and Ed had whispered, "Come on, buddy.
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