Billy had a month before Jim and Harry left in which to interview applicants for the jobs. She saw fifteen men before she found two who were suitable by virtue of both the excellence of their training and the ease of their personalities. The first of them, John Francis Cassidy, known as Jake, had a droll and artful street-urchin look to him and typically Black Irish coloring with thick, white skin and unabashed blue eyes. The second nurse, Ashby Smith, was Georgia born and bred. He wore his red-brown hair rather long, and in his soft voice there was a feeling of fastidiousness mixed with pride, which went agreeably with his slender height and graceful, long hands. They had both been medics in the war, and Billy had the suspicion, if not the certainty, that neither of them was homosexual.
Months passed, an unusually hot spring settled over southern California, and Billy found herself sinking deeper into depression. Every day she had to force herself to get dressed and drive to her tennis lesson or to her exercise class because if she stayed home she found it impossible to sleep at night. When it became too hot to run around chasing tennis balls in the sun, she took to swimming laps in the big pool, trying to exhaust her body, but even when she swam so much that her muscles quivered with the strain, she almost always had to take a sleeping pill, often two of them, before she managed to sleep. She found that liquor helped the process, although she knew it was dangerous. She never permitted herself more than a small wineglass of warm vodka. The lack of ice made it taste like medicine, and she tossed it off in one gulp, the unpleasantness of the taste taking away the tinge of impermissible pleasure that followed.
Billy found herself spending more and more time in the pool house. There, the decorator Lindy had chosen had exercised all the abandon he had not been permitted to put into the big house. It was a large pavilion with a big central room, intended for entertaining, with two wings of dressing rooms and showers for men and women. Looking around at the lavish, voluptuously appointed pavilion, Billy wondered dispiritedly if the decorator had assumed that she would be having many pool parties. There were three puffy divans, ten feet square, covered in thick, red terry cloth and the floor was tiled in a Moroccan design of various shades of purple, pink, and white. Big, soft terry cushions in many shades of purple were piled everywhere. The domed ceiling had been painted in stylized arabesques, and beaded curtains made a slippery whispering sound when anyone passed through them. In one corner there was a bar, which had gradually become covered with the books Billy always carried with her. The pool house had become her favorite place to read because it was so removed, so private and secluded; there, for hours at a time, she could forget the house on the hill and all its occupants. No one, not even the gardeners, was allowed to work near the pool house after midmorning.
One evening of that sultry spring Billy found herself having dinner alone with Jake Cassidy. Morris, the one male nurse left over from the old days, was on duty, and Ash had taken himself off in his car. Billy had no appetite, but she forced herself to take tiny bites of her avocado and crab-meat salad. Every time she put her fork to her plate she caught sight of the black hairs on the white skin below Jake’s cuff. She was almost hypnotized by the movement of his strong wrists. She felt a hungry heaviness, a grindingly good ache, begin between her legs. She let her lids fall over her dark eyes so that he couldn’t see them, couldn’t guess that she was imagining the thickness, the wiriness of his pubic hair, wondering how far up his belly it reached.
“Jake,” Billy said casually, “why is it that you never use the pool?”
“Don’t want to disturb your privacy, Mrs. Ikehorn.”
“That’s thoughtful of you, but it’s a shame to let it go to waste. Come on down tomorrow afternoon and have a swim—it won’t bother me.”
“Hey, thanks! I’ll take you up on that if it’s my afternoon off duty.”
Billy smiled. It would most certainly be his afternoon off. She’d make sure of that right after dinner.
Billy lay full length on one of the red divans, covered only by a large turkish towel, a big soft pillow under her head. The pool house was dim; only an orange glow from the sun outside penetrated, with occasional flicks of light reflected from the surface of the pool. Her eyes were almost closed in the soft light and she sighed deeply in almost unendurable impatience. Finally she heard the whisper of the beaded curtains as Jake Cassidy entered, wearing only a pair of thin, nylon racing trunks. He stopped dead when he saw her, stretched out there, her long, black hair loose and wild in a way he’d never seen it before, her long, tan legs spread carelessly on the red terry cloth.
“It’s almost too hot to swim, isn’t it?” Billy murmured.
“Well—I’ll just have a quick dip—”
“No. No you won’t. Not yet. Come over here, Jake.”
He moved hesitantly toward her and stood close to the divan.
“Sit down, Jake. Right here—there’s plenty of room.” The young man perched gingerly on the edge she had indicated. Billy readied out, took his hand, and drew it toward her.
“Just move a little toward me, Jake, you’re not close enough.”
This time he obeyed quickly, with the final dawning of understanding. Billy took his large hand and guided it under the towel that covered her. He held his breath as he felt her pressing it down her body until it reached her cunt. Her clitoris, already engorged, pouted out from her pubic hair. She took his middle finger and placed it on the hot, wet flesh and slowly slid it back and forth over the precise spot from which her burning body radiated. He immediately took up the rhythm as she pulled off the towel and let him see her, magnificent in her nakedness. Jake bent to suck fiercely on her dark nipples. Billy’s whole body arched upward in longing as she responded to that authoritative finger, that hard man’s hand, that hot man’s mouth. Oh, the difference when it was the flesh of another that touched her. After a minute she looked down the length of his body as he still savaged her breasts. Pushing out, above the drawstring that held his trunks low on his hips was the distended tip of his imprisoned cock. She pulled the drawstring open, on an indrawn breath, and looked, dry mouthed, at his large penis, rock hard and rosy against the whiteness of his belly and the dark thicket of his hair.
“Put it in me,” Billy commanded.
“Wait—I want to—”
“Now!”
Jake straddled her and kneeled on the divan. She took his thrusting stiff prick in her hands and eased it, inch by inch, prolonging the delight until he growled in frustration. Finally, when he filled her entirely, Billy could feel him about to plunge wildly inside her.
“Hold it, Jake,” she whispered into his lips, “got something good to teach you—you’ll like it—” She put her hands on his hips and pushed him backward until his cock was almost entirely withdrawn from her, then she slowly released her forearms so that he reentered her vagina. She could hear his teeth grinding with barely restrained lust, but she paid no attention. Several more times she repeated the maneuver, and the last time she pushed him so far that his cock came out of her entirely. She took it in her hands and leisurely drew the whole length of the underside of his prick across her clitoris and up toward her navel, then drew it back just to the entrance of her cunt. He caught on quickly and rubbed it up and down, again, and again, over her belly, never losing contact with her tumescent clitoris, which Billy now visualized as a dark red, ripe fruit.
“Look at it, look at it,” he muttered. Billy couldn’t take her eyes off the glistening, superb penis on which the veins stood out in bold relief. The head of the cock had grown twice as big while he was inside her, and now she moaned with an excruciating need to have him back inside.
“No, you don’t,” he whispered. “Not so fast—you wanted it like this—you’re going to get it all right, get it good and hard—you’ll get all of it—don’t worry—look at it—look—that’s what you’re going to get—as much as you can take—now!” And he drew back and rammed his prick all the way up, brutally, wonderfully, just as she came in violent, mindless, racki
ng shudders.
They lay on the divan for long minutes, speechlessly waiting for his cock, which was still half hard inside of her, to subside. Billy felt the warm trickle of sperm between her legs and couldn’t imagine how she had gone so long without it, without the quivering, sticky, sweaty reality.
That night Billy dined in her sitting room, telling the butler just to put everything on the coffee table.
“Just leave it, John, I’ll help myself,” she said. “I’m a little tired. Please see that I’m not disturbed.”
She didn’t touch her food. She was in the grip of a snarl of conflicting emotions: deep worry and a return of tearing lust. While part of her mind was concentrated on the memory of the afternoon, even while her cunt twitched involuntarily with the thought of it, even as she lightly, unconsciousy fingered her tangle of pubic hair under her light robe, she mulled anxiously over the repercussions of the incident. Would he tell the others? Boast of it? Would he try to blackmail her? What if this ever became public knowledge? What did he think of her? Not, she reflected, shaking her elegant head for a second at her vestigial puritanism, that it mattered. But what did she know about Jake? How far could she trust him? Billy had the answers to none of these questions and there was no one she could ask. The only thing she was sure of was that she had to have Jake Cassidy again. In her. Deep inside. Soon. Her fists clenched. She licked her lips and paced back and forth. She wanted him now. Her sexual appetites, starved for more than a year and a half, gripped her more violently than they ever had before in her life, even during the times in New York, even during any of the days of her marriage.
Billy abandoned almost all her excursions into Beverly Hills except for the hairdresser and refused all lunch dates. She was afraid to rearrange the nurses’ schedule so that Jake would have every afternoon off, for fear of alerting the others. But two days out of three she went to the pool house after lunch and waited, lying naked, thighs opened shamelessly wide, until he came.
After that first afternoon he had treated her in public exactly as he always had. There was not a flicker of an eye or a secret glance to indicate that he even remembered what had happened between them. He was as respectful and punctilious as ever. All her sharp perceptions told her that no one suspected anything. Nor would they, as long as she didn’t betray herself. And even in the pool house, vibrating like a steel rod inside of her, working his cock in and out of her cunt, he called her by no name and discreetly left her afterward so that there was no need to speak, to use words to talk about what they had been doing, even to get to know each other in this new relationship. How strange, she thought, that she could taste her own juices in his mouth and yet this most intimate communication was nonverbal. It was as if they shared a place that existed only under certain circumstances, at a certain time, a space in which their own everyday personalities dropped away entirely.
Billy’s eroticism became more and more focused on the secrecy and the illicitness of the pool house. Nothing that happened there counted in the real world, yet nothing in the real world mattered compared to the pool house. In the pool house, where she had absolute disposal of the powerful and marvelously willing body of Jake Cassidy, their fucking became more and more experimental and animal. She was not Billy Ikehorn, the sad, rich wife of a dying man; she was somebody—somebody she didn’t give a name to—but somebody who hadn’t existed before. She almost felt as if she could sense this new person being born, separating itself from her, a new person without guilt or standards of behavior, to whom everything was permitted—as long as it was secret. Utterly secret.
In the beginning of her afternoons with Jake Cassidy Billy wondered at what seemed the abnormal way he had of keeping the time they spent together in a separate compartment from all the other times they were in contact during the day. Then she realized that she too wanted it that way, not just because it was safer but because she did not want to know Jake any better than she did. He was likable and efficient in his professional capacity; at the pool house he was a man with an ardent mouth and a stiff prick, but beyond this, she did not care to probe. She didn’t want to know about his family, about his childhood, about his feelings, about his likes or dislikes or any of the other idiosyncrasies that make a person individual and meaningful. It was not that she was deliberately shutting him out of her heart; it was rather that he failed, in some fundamental way, to appeal to that heart, an intransigent heart that steadily refused to confuse lust with sentiment Billy remembered too well what love had been like. Jake Cassidy had nothing to do with love. But she could live without love, if she had to. She had no choice.
Dan Dorman looked at Billy shrewdly. Since his last visit she was getting some, somewhere, he’d bet his life on it. She had that luminous look he hadn’t seen since before Ellis got sick. Good for her. It was about time.
“You’re looking well, Billy. I’d take up tennis myself if I didn’t think I’d drop dead first time on the court at my age.”
“Swimming, Dan, not tennis. I swim about a mile a day now—wonderful exercise. But why don’t you? You could start just doing a few laps a day.”
“In New York? Maybe deep knee bends. Now, about your plan to take Ellis to Palm Springs again, this winter—well, I’m not sure it’s really necessary. It just isn’t going to make that much difference to him this year, unless you enjoy it there, yourself, of course.”
“Good God no. It’s geriatric paradise, Dan. Even the young people look old and dried out. And our house there isn’t nearly as comfortable for us as this one—I’d like to sell it.”
“What about the jet—going to keep it?”
“Definitely. I’m sure that Ellis still enjoys going to Silverado and it’s worth keeping the plane even if we only use it twice a year—with the nurses and everything, we’re like a safari when we set off. Anyway, the cellar master at Silverado would kill me if we didn’t show up for the vintage this year. Do you have any idea of how many vines we had to uproot to build the landing strip? But Dan, why did you say it wouldn’t make any difference to Ellis about Palm Springs this winter?”
“He’s much more withdrawn, Billy. You probably don’t notice it as much as I do because you’re with him every day, but he’s losing interest in life month by month, going away more and more each time I see him. When it rains here this winter he’ll be just as happy indoors, watching the fire or television, if it still interests him. He won’t miss a few days of sunshine.”
“I have noticed it, Dan—his—enormous—remoteness. I was afraid it might be something I wasn’t doing right.”
“Don’t ever, ever think that Billy. He’s getting the best possible care. You can’t compensate for what happens inside a person’s brain when a tiny blood vessel pops. You can only do so much. What are you now, Billy, almost thirty? It’s not much of a life for you.”
“Oh, I manage, Dan, I manage.”
As Billy’s afternoons in the pool house continued, she felt herself changing even further. She had never guessed how aggressive she could become with a man. Except for the two times in her life when she had taken the initiative—once when she crossed the hotel corridor in Barbados to go to Ellis and the first time with Jake—she had always assumed that it was the man who reached out for the woman, who indicated his desire, who aroused the passive yet alluring female. Now she was tasting the thrill of a fresh and almost excruciating pleasure in becoming the one who sought, who demanded, who explored, who drained. When Jake arrived at the pool house she was always there, hungry for him. In early autumn when he started to arrive first a half hour and then an hour late, she found the waiting, the uncertainty, more viciously painful than if she had known he couldn’t come at all. He always had a plausible excuse, but she didn’t believe them. She began to suspect that he enjoyed the power of knowing that she was already there, aroused almost to the point of violence, a voluntary prisoner focused totally on the animal release only he could give her. She had taken him. Now he was trying to turn the tables. She became sure of i
t the afternoon he didn’t come at all, explaining later that he’d just fallen asleep in the sun. Raging with hidden anger, horrified and humiliated but in the grip of her need, her obsession, unable to do anything else, Billy raised his salary by a thousand dollars a month.
Her lust for Jake’s body chewed at her constantly. In the mornings as she saw him passing in the hallways, she followed him with lidded eyes, visualizing the details of their next meeting. When she dined with the nurses, if he was among them, she could barely swallow as she looked at his hands and thought of what they could do to her. One Monday morning after he had had the weekend off, she came upon him passing the door of her room and gripped his wrist. She pulled him into the room, locked the door behind them, unzipped his pants, searched frantically for his cock, and made him hard with her hand. Then she rubbed herself against him until she came, still wearing her nightgown, the two of them leaning and panting against the wall like a pair of teenagers. Another day, when he had been on duty during the afternoon, she waylaid him after dinner and led him to a guest bathroom on the first floor of the mansion. She ripped off her panty hose and panties, sat on the lid of the toilet, forced him down on his knees, and pushed his head between her spread legs, thrusting her aching, wet cunt at his lips. He brought her to a quick, sharp orgasm with his tongue, but somehow it wasn’t enough of what she wanted. She made him stand up in front of her, and still sitting, she took his penis in her mouth and sucked him off, the world reduced to that jut of flesh that she attacked so thirstily, with such craving. When he had slipped out of the door she sat in the locked bathroom for almost an hour, disconcerted and still unfulfilled. Billy knew that she was getting out of control. Either the incident in her bedroom or their joint disappearance of tonight could have been observed by any one of the servants who came and went about the house.
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