So Willing Read online

  “What if somebody sees us?” And Bobbi looked up the slope, straight at where Vince was hiding. Even though he knew it was impossible for her to see him, he winced and ducked lower into the grass.

  “Nobody ever comes up here,” Adele said offhandedly, and she stripped off her shirt. She was wearing a bra beneath it, which was a waste of good money. Those bee-bites of hers didn’t need any support at all. She spread the shirt on the grass, then removed the bra, and her breasts barely cast a shadow.

  Bobbi, still a little hesitant, also stripped off her wet clothes. Vince looked at them both, and he thought they really should have been cut closer to the middle of the deck. Where Adele was thin as a rail, with breasts smaller than the White Rock girl, and hips skinnier than a basketball player’s; Bobbi was busting out all over. She had breasts that could have been used for sandbags, and a butt that was a sandbag. Nothing else in the world could be that wide and round and saggy.

  They were both nude before it occurred to him that his status had just changed from eavesdropper, which wasn’t really very bad, to peeping tom, which was very bad. He ought to get away from there before they found him and got the wrong idea.

  But he was afraid to move, afraid he might make some small sound that they would hear. And now, with their clothes off, they’d be more alert for the sounds of other people. So he stayed where he was, and waited for a chance to slip away.

  Besides, it was pleasant to have a preview of Adele’s body. The legs, as he’d already known, were very good, with strong and supple thighs and good calves. And her stomach was flat, her waist delicate and tiny. The bee-bite breasts weren’t much, but it might be fun to play with them a bit. Play delicately, of course, in relation to their size. Just with fingers, not with the whole hand.

  Now stripped, Adele lay on her back, one arm across her eyes to keep out the sun, one knee raised. Vince nodded approvingly. That’s the position, little baby, he thought. You just keep practicing that.

  And then Bobbi’s hand reached out and squeezed Adele’s breast.

  Vince blinked. What the hell was that all about?

  He’d expected Adele to sit up like a shot, hollering, but she didn’t do anything of the kind. Instead, she smiled and murmured, and reached up to press Bobbi’s hand tighter against her breast.

  “I do love you so,” Bobbi said, and her voice was so soft that Vince could barely make out the words. “You know how much I love you. You shouldn’t tease me the way you do.”

  “I know, honey,” Adele said soothingly. She smiled up at Bobbi contritely and said, “I won’t do that any more.”

  Bobbi leaned down and kissed Adele on the lips, and Adele’s arms twined around the other girl, and soon they were lying side by side on the grass, stroking each other’s body and murmuring.

  After the first movement by Bobbi, Adele became the aggressor of the two. Bobbi lay flat on her back, and Adele leaned over her, stroking her breasts and stomach and thighs, kissing her, leaning down to nip at her breasts, kissing all over Bobbi’s body.

  When they really got into it, and Vince knew they wouldn’t be paying any attention to outside sounds for a while, he crept slowly back down the slope, and headed down the path for the road and his car. He kept shaking his head in disgusted amazement, and trying to figure out what the hell kind of world it was he was living in anyway.

  Well, he’d found his virgin. There was no getting around that, he’d found a guaranteed virgin. Guaranteed for life.

  And that, he told himself, was definitely that. First two phonies, and now a dyke. Talk about queering the deal! Okay, the virgin-hunt was off. He was cured.

  Back at the road, he got into the car and drove toward home. The virgin-hunt was off, and he was soured on the lake. He didn’t want to be at any lake with Rhonda and Adele—the relationship kid and the dyke. He didn’t know for sure where he did want to be, but he did know for sure he didn’t want to be at the lake.

  His father was reading the paper, inevitably, on the screened-in porch of the cabin. Vince went into his bedroom, which had a window looking out onto the porch, and grabbed his suitcase. As he stuffed clothes into it, he said through the window to his father, “You aren’t going to be needing the car for about a week, are you?”

  His father looked up from the paper, startled. “What?” His suitcase packed, Vince said,

  “I’d like to take off in the car for about a week. You don’t need it, do you?”

  “Well—well, no. But—”

  “Okay if I take it for a week? Don’t worry, I won’t crack it up or anything.”

  “I know that,” his father said. “You’re a good driver, Vince. But—”

  “Then it’s okay, huh?”

  “Well, I suppose so, but—”

  “Fine.” He grabbed the suitcase and left the bedroom.

  His father followed, the paper trailing from his hand. “Where are you going?”

  Vince dumped the suitcase into the backseat of the car, slid behind the wheel, said, “See you in a week,” and took off.

  FOUR

  The trouble with just pointing the car and heading down the road was that you might just happen to wind up in Brighton. And it wasn’t easy to imagine a worse place than Brighton. Even the cruddy cabin by the cruddy lake, rustically rotten as it was, would have been better. Except, of course, for charmers like Rhonda and Adele.

  The combination of Relationship Rhonda and Dykey Adele made it necessary to head for greener pastures. But Brighton wasn’t exactly greener pastures. It was more on the order of a desert.

  It was so simple at first, Vince thought. You got in the car, stepped on the gas, and drove. When you found a quarry worth pursuing, then you stopped.

  Sure you did.

  The problems occurred after you were heading down the old road. There were plenty of problems. For one thing, you didn’t know where the hell you were going. For another thing, you had to get the damned car back to the damned cabin in a week, maybe ten days at the outside. That sort of ruled out a trip to any town that might be worth going to.

  This limited things. He couldn’t go to Florida, which might have been nice, and he couldn’t go to California, which also might have been nice, and he couldn’t go to Alaska, which might have been even nicer. But he still could have gone to New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston. New York, in some small way, meant Rhonda, which was disturbing, but Boston or Philadelphia would have been one hell of a lot better than Brighton.

  Brighton.

  But there was one more problem, one overwhelming problem, and the problem was money. More precisely, the lack of money. He had fifty dollars and change with him when he took off, and while fifty dollars was a small fortune when you lived with your folks, fifty dollars was very little when it was the sole support of both yourself and a car.

  A hungry car. A car that, with a good tailwind, managed ten miles to the gallon. A car that drank oil like a Bowery bum with a thing for petroleum. A car that could easily burn up fifty dollars getting to Boston or Philadelphia or New York.

  The smart thing to do was to turn back and give it up as a bad job. But that meant Rhonda, and Adele, and more than anything else it meant admitting defeat.

  So he did the dumb thing—which meant Brighton.

  He pushed the car seventy miles down the road, passing two towns even worse than Brighton, towns consisting of a gas pump and a general store and three empty houses. And then he reached Brighton, which had more empty houses and two general stores and an occasional hitching post. It was about time either to fill the gas tank or park the car. So he parked the car. It was cheaper.

  He had a plan. The plan was the essence of simplicity. He would get the cheapest room he could find, eat the cheapest meals he could stomach, and lay the prettiest girl in the town. Not a virgin, and not a dyke, and not an Uninhibited Relationship. A girl, an ordinary girl. There had to be at least one pretty girl in Brighton, for God’s sake.

  So he got a room, a cubbyhole in a white fra
me Rooms-For-Rent run by a gray-headed keep-smiling tub of lard named Mrs. Rebecca Sharp. The room was fifteen dollars a week with meals, and by the looks of Mrs. Sharp, she could cook well. The room was clean, the meals turned out fine, and money was a little less of a problem.

  And then, all settled, he went on the hunt for the prettiest girl in Brighton. And found her.

  Her name was Saralee Jenkins and she was beautiful. Her face was the best part, sort of along the lines of a small-town Grace Kelly, with long blonde hair and blue eyes and an occasional freckle on her nose. The body was good, too. Not quite as good as Rhonda, maybe, but a hell of a lot better than Adele the Dyke. She was kind of short, with well-established breasts and a very slim waist, with legs that were damned fine up to the knee and probably better and better as they went along.

  And she was not a virgin. If anybody was not a virgin, she was not a virgin. No virgin looked at you in quite that way. No virgin moved her tail in quite that manner when she walked down the street. There might be a virgin somewhere in the civilized world, but this was definitely not the one.

  She worked behind the counter at the drugstore, making sodas and sundaes for the local yokels and frying an occasional greasy hamburger for an occasional greasy kid. Vince saw her for the first time when he stopped in for a coke, and he knew right away that this was the girl; that she was the only one in Brighton worth bothering with, that she was fair game, and that she was not a virgin. This last point he knew instinctively, and later he found it out for certain.

  And this was part of the problem. In fact, it was the problem, plain and simple.

  She was married.

  There were a few rules in the quail-hunting game, and one of them was that you did not fool around with a married woman. You just didn’t. All you got out of it was trouble, and occasionally you got killed, and it just wasn’t worth it. Vince had had enough opportunities in the past, and once or twice he had been genuinely tempted, but each time his guns had remained in his holster and the prize had not been shot down. There were women in Modnoc, available women, and they had made their availability obvious. But he had pictured himself in the saddle when the horse’s owner walked into the room, and he had quietly forgotten the women involved.

  But this was different.

  For one thing, Saralee was too damned willing to play. That message hit him the minute he saw her, even before he saw the gold band on her finger. The way she looked at him, and the way she talked to him, and everything else about her—she was just there to be had.

  Which was bad.

  What was worse was that he wanted her, wanted her badly. The Adele episode had left him badly shaken. He needed a girl now, and without one he might go quietly mad. And the rest of the available talent in Brighton was either ugly or virginal. Saralee was neither.

  He wanted her and she wanted him. And meanwhile her jerk of a husband, old Bradley Jenkins, stood in the back of the store filling prescriptions. That was all the dumb son-of-a-bitch seemed to know how to do. There was Saralee, itching for love, and the moron was filling prescriptions. It was ridiculous.

  He talked with her for about half an hour the first day. She kept dropping hints and he pretended to be too dumb to see what she was getting at, which would have been very dumb indeed. Then, miraculously, the coke was gone, and he had a chance to leave.

  So he did.

  He spent the rest of the day trying to find someone else to spend the week with, but there wasn’t anyone. The girls who had looked merely beastly at first, now looked downright nauseating. He walked all over town, which took all of fifteen minutes, and the more he walked and the more girls he looked at, the worse they looked and the better Saralee looked.

  He got back to Mrs. Sharp’s just in time for supper, which didn’t taste as good this day as it had the day before. He didn’t feel much like eating. He felt being alone, and after dinner he went to his room and stretched out on the bed.

  There were so many reasons to stay away from Saralee Jenkins. Fine reasons. But the more he thought about them, the less important they became. There were other reasons, reasons why he should crawl between Saralee’s anxious arms as soon as possible; and these reasons grew bigger and loomed larger and more significant the more he pondered them.

  She was hungry for it, that was for sure. Her broken-down excuse for a husband wasn’t doing his job. She needed a young man, and he needed her, and that was that.

  She would be good. She would be damned good and hungry the way she was, hungry for him. It was good to have principles, and staying away from married women was a good principle to have, but there was a limit. She was worth stepping out of line for.

  More important, it wasn’t as if he was crapping in his own backyard. Nobody knew him in Brighton. He could creep up on her like a thief in the night, get what he’d come for, and then head back to the little cabin on the lake. That would be the end of her and the end of Brighton, and to hell with both of them.

  He still didn’t like it. Either way he didn’t like it. Staying in Brighton without sleeping with her would be impossible, and creeping back to the lake with his tail between his legs would be unbearable, and heading onward and downward to still another hick town in the middle of nowhere would be even worse.

  And, in the meantime, the second day was drawing to an uneventful close. There were just five more days, and then it was back to the lake, which meant he didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to play games. Five days to get in and get out and go home.

  The first thing to do, he told himself, was to relax. He counted his money, decided he couldn’t really afford to see a movie but that he was going to do so anyway.

  The price was a pleasant half a buck, which was a break, but the movie was a western, which wasn’t. He sat through it, sighed with relief when it was over, and headed back to the room to sack out.

  Before he went to sleep, his mind was made up. He was going to drop over to the drugstore the next afternoon. If anything happened, it happened. If nothing happened, nothing happened.

  He drifted off to sleep hoping desperately that something would happen.

  Something happened. It was a few minutes after two when he strolled into the drugstore, took a stool at the counter and ordered a coke. She gave him, in addition to the coke, a huge grin and a quick wink that was about as subtle as a blasting cap. When she shoved the coke at him she managed to lean so far over the counter that her uniform dropped about five inches away from her breasts. The breasts had looked damned good with the uniform around them and looked even better all by themselves. He tried to look away, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Like what you see?”

  He stared at her.

  “Because if you do—”

  A customer came in and mercifully cut the discussion short before it really got going. The customer was a middle-aged woman with a pot belly who had the gall to order a double banana split with extra whipped cream. It took Saralee awhile to slap the garbage together, and while she was splitting bananas and scooping ice cream he tried to pull himself together.

  She wasn’t just forward. She was brazen, and eager, and ready. It wasn’t a quail hunt, not this time. It was a rooster hunt. She was the one who was doing the hunting, and he was the one who was being hunted, and somehow this took the joy of the chase out of it.

  But, at the same time….

  It took the woman a lot less time to devour the double banana split than it had taken Saralee to prepare it. The sloppy old broad waddled out of the drugstore and off into the wilds of Brighton, and there they were again.

  He felt trapped.

  “He’s old and he’s ugly and he’s no good,” she was telling him. “And you’re young and fresh and I want you. How old are you, Vince?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Most boys your age would have said they were older than that.”

  He shrugged. If she thought he was going to lie about his
age just for a chance at her fair young body, she had another think coming.

  “I never lie,” he lied.

  “I’m only nineteen,” she said. “I guess it’s all right. I mean, I’m two years older than you, but it doesn’t make much difference. You’re probably pretty mature for your age, anyway.”

  Sure, he thought. But only below the neck.

  “And he’s forty-three,” she said, nodding in the direction of the prescription department. “Forty-three years old and no damn good at all. You know what it’s like for a girl with a man like that?”

  “Must be rough.”

  She nodded. “It’s horrible.”

  He took a breath. “Look,” he said. “I mean, there must be guys in town. You shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  “That’s just it, Vince. I’m not a tramp. If I did it with anybody from Brighton it would be all over town. Don’t you see? But you’re from out of town and nobody would have to know. We would just do it and it would be great and then it would be over.”

  “I guess I’m the answer to a maiden’s prayers.”

  She leaned close, giving him another look at her navel. “I’m no maiden,” she said. “But you’re the answer. You got a car?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Listen to me. You pick me up on the corner of Fourth and Schwerner at seven-thirty. We’ll be done with dinner by then and I’ll tell him I’m going out for a walk. But I won’t be going for a walk. I’ll be going for a ride, and then we’ll stop the car, and then well both be going for a ride again. You understand?”

  “Seven-thirty,” he said stupidly.

  “That’s right. You’ll be there, won’t you? Because I’ll be waiting.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You sound afraid. You’re not afraid of me, are you? I don’t think you’re afraid. I’ll bet you’ve had lots of girls. I’ll bet you’re real good at it.”

  “Don’t worry,” he advised her. “I’m not a virgin. There aren’t any.”

  For a minute she looked bewildered, which was understandable. Then she did another deep knee bend and showed him her chest again.