But I did not go home.
I went elsewhere.
I went to 114 West 69th Street. Up the stairs, into the front vestibule. I looked at the nameplates and found out that Rosie’s last name was Ryan.
She was lucky on that score. If it had been O’Grady I would have gotten the hell out of there once and for all. Sweet Rosie O’Grady at eight o’clock in the goddamned morning is a bit much.
Or if she lived on Washington Square. You know the song:
Well, anyhow. I stood in that vestibule and thought about things, but not too deeply. And then I found the bell for her apartment, Apt. 3-C.
And I rang it.
Twice.
3
The silence was like a woman yawning. Then a buzzer shattered it. I leaned on the door and it opened. I was in the elevator on the way to the fourth floor before the buzzer shut up.
There were four apartments to a floor so I didn’t have a hell of a lot of trouble finding 3-C. I hit the bell, ringing twice again for the hell of it, and waited like a college kid at a whorehouse until the door opened.
I caught my breath.
“Come on in,” she said. “You had me worried for a while there. I didn’t know whether or not you were going to show up. I was all ready for bed and everything, and here you are.”
There I was. And there she was all ready for bed and everything. She was barefoot and all she was wearing was this pink silk affair that didn’t do a hell of a lot to protect her from the elements. It must have been thrown together during the war when they were short of silk.
I could see her nipples through it.
She had to close the door because I didn’t have the strength. I reached for her instantly but she sidestepped, a coy little smile on her coy little face, and suddenly I felt very foolish. I was out of practice. There is a rigid code of play in affairs of this nature and I was a little rusty on the ground rules. Maybe you think it’s a cinch to find yourself in a fairly decent apartment with the greatest thing since sex was invented. It’s not that simple. You have to be very cool about the whole thing, and I wasn’t.
“Easy,” she said. “Easy, baby. There’s plenty here and it won’t spoil. Take your time. Have a seat. Let me fix you a drink.”
She pointed to a couch and I sank into it like a grateful refugee from a Chinese prison camp. While she disappeared to concoct drinks I looked around the apartment and wondered how she paid for it. I had a pretty good idea, but what the hell.
“Straight or how?”
“Water,” I said. Straight liquor at eight in the morning is fine for some people. So is straight heroin. Me, I’m just a country boy.
She came back with two glasses and gave one of them to me. There was too much bourbon in it and not too much water but I took an obliging sip from it and set the glass down on the leather-top coffee table. I wondered if the glass would make a mark on the table and decided that, all things considered, I didn’t give a damn.
She sat down next to me and she was so close I could smell her. There was no water in the glass, just bourbon. She polished off half of it in one swallow.
I reached for her.
“Easy,” she said a second time. “You can’t expect a girl to roll over on her back the minute a cute guy like you walks into her apartment. A girl likes to be romanced a little. Why don’t you romance me a little?”
“Like how?”
“Like this.”
She gave me a gentle kiss. At least it started out as a gentle kiss. It didn’t quite wind up that way. It wound up like an oral rape.
She wrapped her arms around me and closed me up in a bear hug that put all of her very close to all of me. Her breasts came through my back and her tongue did things to my mouth that hadn’t been done to it in a long time.
Rosie was quite a kisser. Usually I like to lead but with her I didn’t have a chance. Her tongue pried my lips apart and flitted into my mouth like a hopped-up hummingbird, and all the while she was holding me so tight against her that I couldn’t breathe. Not that I wanted to. I was happy just the way I was.
She let go of the bear hug and I found out what air was like again. But it was only the beginning. One hand dropped to my thigh and she began to fool around a little. She played games with me and showed me a few little tricks that Mata Hari must have been pretty proud of. I grabbed her again and this time she didn’t tell me to take it easy, and I didn’t.
I got a hand into that pink silk nonsense and took hold of her breast. It was a nice breast to take hold of. I tried to cup it but my hand wasn’t big enough.
So I used both hands. I mean, what the hell. I’m an easy guy to get along with.
She liked it when I touched her there. She started letting out these cute little moans and her hot little hands learned some new tricks on the spot. Me, I was having the time of my life. I’ve always been inordinately fond of breasts and she had plenty of breast to be fond of.
I got inspired and went to town. Pretty soon the silk fluff was a tangled mess on the floor and neither of us could have cared less. I shoved her down on the couch and crouched over her, my mouth busy with her breasts. She was squirming all over the place now, her moans shaking the walls and her eyes clenched tightly shut in the agony of passion.
My hands were all over her. I found a spot on the inside of her thigh that set her off completely. All I had to do was touch her there and she started shaking like an aspen in a tornado and moaning like a Siamese cat in heat.
When I kissed her there, my lips working like sixty, neither of us could take it anymore. She told me where the bedroom was and we headed in that direction. I don’t know why we bothered. We could have done it right in the middle of the living room floor and neither of us would have minded it a bit.
But we found the bedroom. The bed was a huge affair with a brass bedstead and all, and she fell on top of it as if she had been shot with a medium-size cannon. I got my clothes off. Please don’t ask me how. I will always regard it as one of the major accomplishments of my life.
I was standing there, naked as a jaybird, and she was lying there, naked as a jaybird. She was also panting like a truck horse and, as I mentioned before, shaking like an aspen in a hurricane and moaning like a Siamese cat in heat. Her arms were at her sides, her hands balled up into tight fists.
I grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Ted?”
It came out in a moan and I grinned some more.
“Ted?”
The grin spread.
“What are you going to do, Ted?”
I said: “I’m going to get into something more comfortable.”
It was weird and wild and wicked and wonderful. She was a big girl and her body was a warm cushion, a hot pillow that tossed me to the top of the world and back again. She started moaning when it began and the moans got so loud that at one point I was afraid the ceiling was going to come down on us.
Her nails dug holes in my back.
I was a prisoner in a huge fortress of breasts and thighs and acres of female flesh. I was captive in a sexual jail, a willing slave, a condemned man eating a hearty meal. I moved and she moved and the motions were a primitive dance to a hungry god.
It was incredible.
For a while there I didn’t think it was ever going to stop. Day turned to night, night turned back to day, and the whole process kept repeating like a spinning yin and yang sign. I felt as though I was being devoured whole, eaten alive and digested and assimilated into the body of this unbelievable woman Rosie. Sweet Rosie. My little Rosie, with one hell of a yen for men.