Mark just stared at her. Her breasts were full and round. He had touched them, had his mouth round them already, and he knew how beautiful they were. But seeing her totally naked was something else. She was innocent – yet completely aware. There was nothing coy in the way she stood, she was a young woman waiting to make love for the first time. She was breathing deeply and her breasts were rising and falling in rhythm. The honesty of her desire gave her beauty. His breath caught in his throat. His eyes were fixed on her pubic mound. She caught the direction of his gaze and involuntarily her hand reached for herself, and she lightly fingered the hair there. She stared at him, unblinking, every inch of her an invitation. Yet he did not have an erection. Mark Piddle, superstud, was standing looking at a naked young girl, and he didn’t have a hard-on. He was transfixed. Mesmerised.
‘It’ll be all right,’ he heard her say softly.
She was reassuring him. Amazing. But he began to believe that this time it would be.
She stepped forward and took him in her arms and he buried his head in her neck. Then the smell of her engulfed him. The same body scent that had driven him wild two years earlier, that had excited him so much when they had been together in his car, when she had refused to let him take her, even though he knew she had wanted it as much as him. He was aware that she was sweating slightly and also that her juices must already be running. She smelt of earthy demanding sex. And it was delicious.
Now he was starting to swell at last. He felt her slip her hands inside his shorts and her touch was electric. She undid the button of the waistband. They were old tennis shorts and their soft whiteness flattered his youthful brown skin. With the fingers of one hand she traced patterns through the fuzzy baby hair covering his chest, down over his flat stomach, down, down. He helped her remove the shorts. He was wearing no underpants. They stood naked, looking at each other. He was fully erect now. This time he took her in his arms.
‘I won’t hurt you, Jenny, I’d never hurt you,’ he muttered urgently, unaware that it had never occurred to her that he would.
His cock dug into her belly, damp yet burning against her. He could feel her eagerness and began to realise that she had no fear of the size of him, nor of the power of his desire.
‘I know you won’t,’ she said, clinging to him.
‘I am going to make you so ready that when I put it into you it will just slip in as if it belongs there,’ he told her.
‘I think it does belong there,’ she whispered.
He melted. He laid her on the bed then and opened her legs and buried his head between them. She had read about this, but what Mark was doing to her exceeded her wildest expectations. He licked and sucked and nibbled her to distraction, and she felt herself opening wide as he darted his tongue in and out of her. Mark was loving it too. Out of guilt he had occasionally done this to Irene – although only usually to get round her again after having served her roughly. But he knew the pleasure it could give. It was the only time he ever brought Irene to orgasm, because when he actually entered her he always did so with such force and selfishness that the poor girl didn’t stand a chance.
This was the bed he had shared with Irene. He tried to put all thoughts of her out of his mind. With Jenny starting to writhe and moan beneath him, it was not difficult.
She was saying something. What was it? She was squeezing his head with her legs, blocking his ears. ‘Can I taste you too? I’d like to know what you taste like.’
Could she? This was unbelievable. This was sensational. This was what he had been looking for all his life. She was just like him. She was pure animal, and the sex in her was taking control of her now. Her first time and she wanted to suck his cock!
With practiced agility he swung round in the bed so that he was kneeling above her. He was careful not to push it at her – he didn’t want to put her off. She teased the end of him with her tongue. She paused – and he was pretty sure she was licking her lips. Then she lifted her head and took him in her mouth. He realised that she really had been licking her lips, deciding to herself whether she liked the taste and the smell of him. Obviously she did. Her tongue moved like a hot wet worm and she sucked him into her.
He couldn’t stand any more of it. He was afraid he was going to come in her mouth – and that would be sure to put her off on her very first time. He hauled himself off her, turned around and lay on the bed beside her. She looked dreamy, eyes half closed, in another world.
‘Do it to me, do it to me now, oh please, oh please.’
Those same words, that same husky voice, two years on. He rolled over on top of her, held himself up on one arm and reached with his other hand to guide himself into her. She was there before him, her hands around him, steering him into her. Incredible. Her legs were bent up around him. She was ready. Gently, gently, firmly, firmly, he pushed himself slowly into her until the whole length of him was inside. Then he started to move. He saw the surprise flicker fleetingly in her eyes, then the lust darken her pupils. Suddenly she was moving with him, as if she had done this all her life. It had not hurt her at all. She had indeed been ready.
She heaved and rolled and tossed beneath him like a wave in the ocean on a wild stormy day. It was too much. He came like a steam engine, shooting into her deep sweetness. He had never felt such ecstasy. Such fulfilment. All his life he had been violently searching for this kind of satisfaction. Yet here was the satisfaction without violence at all. He rolled off her, breathing like a marathon runner, and felt a wonderful peace enveloping him. He thought he could sleep for a month, float away on a cloud of joy. But he wouldn’t let himself do that. He wanted to take her to the heights of orgasm, to make her fly. He realised that he had never before given a damn whether any woman he was with came or not, but this was different. This was really different.
‘I’m sorry it was so quick,’ he whispered to her. ‘The second time I’ll last for ever, I promise. I want to make you come and come. You are going to have amazing orgasms, I just know it.’
She was lying beside him, panting still. Smiling.
Eager for anything that might come next. He stretched out a hand and began to play with her.
‘You are something else,’ he said.
Her smile broadened. Then she threw back her head against the pillows and went for it, using her fingers. Just watching her made him hard again very fast. This time he would have the control to give her even greater pleasure. He lowered himself carefully on top of her again, and very gently eased the length of him into her. He thought he was bigger than he had ever been, but she didn’t seem to mind. Mind? She loved it.
When he was completely inside and he knew she was comfortable with him in there, he started to move, to really move. He could feel her muscles opening and closing around him all the time as he sucked and stroked her breasts. After a while he rolled her over on top of him. He reached behind and played with her there with his fingers. Teasing, tantalising the glands she had not known existed. She loved that too. She was off in a trance. He kept thinking she was going to come at any moment, but he knew that she hadn’t quite made it.
He lay beneath her, thanking God that he could always last so long the second time. Then he lifted her off him and bent her over the edge of the bed. He wanted her in every possible way, and he knew she wanted that too. She was strong and athletic, not a compliant cell in her body. At one point, face down and flat on the bed, she had somehow managed to lift her legs and wrap them around him backwards, making him go even deeper inside her. Then she reached back with her arms, stretching behind him, and probed and pushed and stroked with her long fingers. She must be double-bloody-jointed, he thought desperately as he was finally unable to last any longer. His second orgasm was better even than the first. Deep deep satisfaction once more. Oh yes, this was what he had been looking for. If only he had found her before. And if only he could make her come. God, he wanted her to come.
He lifted her up the bed and rested her head on the pillows. Then he cuddled her.
He had never bothered to do that to anyone before, either.
‘That was the best ever,’ he told her.
‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she replied.
‘No,’ he said truthfully.
He looked at her glistening with sweat, still panting.
‘God I want to give you an orgasm.’
‘Well maybe I’ve had one,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like.’
He laughed and shook his head.
‘No. You’ll know when it happens. And it’s going to be a sensation. I’m sure of that. Shall I try one more time?’
She smiled invitingly. This time he went down on her again. Irene had always come so obligingly quickly when he did that. But not this one. He sucked her for ever. He wouldn’t let her suck him. He wanted her to concentrate on herself. She did. Giving in totally to all the lovely softness, the wet warmth of it. She was so close all the time, he knew that. But he couldn’t quite send her over the edge.
Eventually she had to go home and he still hadn’t brought her to orgasm.
‘It was good for you, wasn’t it?’ he asked anxiously.
God, he had never given a damn before. Then he asked her if she could get away the next evening and be with him; he would make her come then definitely.
She just smiled.
The police called the next morning and asked Mark to go to the station again, for the third and final time. Several different officers went over every word of his statement, asking him the same questions repeatedly. Again and again they made him tell them what had happened, with Johnny, with Irene, checking and double-checking every fact. Always he gave the same answers he had on the previous occasions. All that he said made sense. Every so often they left him alone in the interview room, except for a constable standing silently just inside the door. And every time he was left alone he found himself thinking about Jenny. In fact, apart from his actual sessions with the police, and in spite of all that was going on, and all his unease and his fears, he spent most of the twenty-four hours before he would be with her again thinking about her.
By the time she arrived at his flat the next evening, he had all kinds of plans for her. They melted into each other’s arms as she stepped through the door. ‘God I want you,’ he muttered.
‘Me too,’ she said eagerly.
No game playing with this one. Pure lust, pure sex, pure need. He undressed her slowly and carefully and, when she stood naked before him, led her into the bedroom. There was a big white towel on the bed. She looked at him with just a hint of alarm in her eyes. He whispered reassurance. Obediently she lay down as he instructed and waited for him. He could smell her already. He stripped to his underpants. His erection had started as soon as he heard her knock on the door, but he was trying not to think about it. He reached for the baby oil he had put on the bedside table.
For the rest of the afternoon, Mark used all the imaginative tricks he had ever learned to bring Jenny Stone to the heights of her considerable sexuality. She purred with pleasure, like a great big sexy kitten. A wild cat kitten, he thought, a puma, a panther. He used his fingers and his tongue and the touch of his body, feather-light and tantalising, but he would not enter her until she begged him to. Not until she seemed almost unconscious with pleasure, crying out again and again for him to fuck her, did he eventually do so.
And even his extraordinary sexual energy was waning by the time he finally saw her face change and knew what was beginning to happen to her.
Watching her writhing beneath him, listening to her animal cries, experiencing her contractions so acutely it was almost painful – he had known she was going to be wild, yes he had always known that, but Mark had not imagined anything like this. The feeling for him was sensational. Now he could let go at last, now he could think about his own pleasure. He relaxed his tense muscles and in one final, nerve-rending thrust he was coming too, coming with her, shouting his joy as loudly as she was screaming hers. In the last throes of her passion she kicked out so hard and with such strength that she smashed a hole in the sloping ceiling at one side of his bed and severely stubbed her toe.
She felt no pain. Only the greatest, most extreme, and inexplicable pleasure in the world.
Afterwards it took him a long time to calm her down. To bring her back to normality. She lay trembling in his arms, damp and warm and wonderful and stinking of it, her hair soaking wet with her own sweat, unable to speak at first.
When she did she grinned crookedly at him, raised her eyebrows quizzically, and said: ‘So that’s what all the fuss is about.’
He kissed her long and hard on the mouth.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know how I ever lived without it,’ she replied.
And she meant it.
CHAPTER TEN
During the rest of that year, Jenny and Mark continued to explore the craziest heights of their sexuality. He didn’t think any two people could be better matched, although she didn’t know yet that they had anything special. He was quite sure that she thought it was always like this and that every woman was like her. She was still at school, for Christ’s sake. Mark sometimes fantasised to himself about Jenny in a gymslip, but he instinctively knew never to ask her to play dressing-up games. To her, that would be silly and demeaning. She was an animal, a highly toned totally sexual animal, not a tart – and Mark knew the difference.
In the September, Jenny had gone back to school, the final year of her A-level GCEs, and not even her closest school friends knew she was sleeping with Mark. From the very beginning, sex to Jenny Stone was something you did, not something you talked about. She wasn’t into giggly girly chat, and she was always suspicious of people who talked about sex all the time, wondering whether they actually did it at all. Anyway, she had to be careful –her parents thought Mark was too old for her. She overheard her father once telling her mother that he didn’t like the look in the young feller’s eye.
Jenny knew exactly what he meant, and she loved that look in Mark Piddle’s eye.
Their lust for each other did not diminish, instead it seemed to grow more intense. They were obsessed with each other’s bodies.
Irene did not reappear. Sometimes Jenny tried to talk to Mark about it, but he would immediately pull down the shutters. He told her it was another life; whatever had happened to Irene, he did not want to know about it any more.
At the end of August, Johnny Cooke was charged with the murder of Marjorie Benson. The word was that the police suspected him of having killed Irene too, but, in spite of extensive searches, no body was found.
For the rest of her life, Jennifer Stone could never get over her own reaction to Johnny’s arrest. At first she hardly noticed it, just as she had hardly noticed the disappearance of Irene. She had been trying to put the murder and her discovery of the body out of her mind, and it wasn’t all that difficult because of her obsession with Mark Piddle. She was totally besotted by him as he was by her. All she could really think about, night and day, was their sex life together. That had become the sole reason for her existence, and it was desperately hard for her to concentrate on her schoolwork or to behave normally at home. Her excuses for the time spent in Mark’s bed were always elaborate and well thought out, but, none the less, she knew her parents suspected that something very heavy was going on.
If she had thought about Johnny and the murder and the events surrounding it, she might have been concerned from the beginning – but, strange though it appeared in retrospect, she did not think about it at all.
The trial did confront her with some unpleasant realities. It started at Exeter Crown Court just before Christmas. Jenny, of course, was a witness because she had found the body, and so was Mark, to whom Johnny had made his confession. Twenty-five years later, Jenny remembered that as the start of her niggling worries. She was quite sure in her own mind that Mark had originally told her he believed Johnny to be innocent. When she confronted Mark he was as coo
l as ever. He must have confused her, he said. Johnny had confessed, right enough, and Mark reckoned he was guilty as hell.
He didn’t look at her as he spoke. But she accepted what he said. She was, after all, quite besotted by him.
At the trial, and under formidable cross-examination, Johnny continued to protest his innocence but finally admitted that it was he with whom Marjorie Benson had had sex on the night of her death. There was further damning evidence against him.
When Marjorie Benson’s body was discovered she was wearing a skirt but no blouse. She had obviously struggled with her assailant, and clumps of hair had been ripped from her head. The missing blouse, torn and crumpled, had been found screwed up beneath a pile of logs in the shed where Johnny kept his bicycle. There were hairs found on the blouse with the follicles of skin still attached to them. They almost certainly came from Marjorie Benson’s head. And the blouse had large imitation brass buttons, one of which bore a clear thumbprint – it was Johnny Cooke’s.
Johnny’s defence counsel had asked why on earth the boy should take such incriminating evidence to his own home. The prosecution counsel countered with a list of murderers who had collected bizarre and incriminating souvenirs from their victims. The jury was captivated, so much so that Johnny’s barrister wished he had never queried the evidence in the first place.
Thirdly there was Johnny’s confession to Mark Piddle. Mark gave his evidence with his usual cool lucidity. He told the court how Johnny had come to him within hours of the body being found, and, still in shock, had confessed everything and begged Mark not to go to the police. He had said: ‘I killed her,’ and: ‘It is my fault she is dead.’ Mark gave what he described as a more or less verbatim account of the midnight meeting. He was articulate and convincing.
Jenny had already given her evidence when he was called. As a material witness she was therefore able to sit in the public gallery if she wished. Upset again by the renewed vision of that grotesque body floating beside her, she had nearly left the court. But some morbid fascination led her to stay for the rest of the day, and as she watched Mark in the witness box, she began to feel more and more uneasy. He was so sure of himself, yet while he was talking she looked at Johnny Cooke, the accused. He was staring at Mark, shaking his head. At one point he started to stand up, as if he was going to protest, until his barrister put a firm hand on his shoulder, keeping him in his seat. Jenny listened very carefully, then she waited outside the court for Mark. She was more bewildered than anything else.
The Cruelty of Morning Page 11