"Yes," she whispered at last almost in wonderment. "Yes, honey! Yes, that feels better. Yes, do it to me like that!"
Cautiously, the young bride lifted her buttocks up from the bed, rolling them in a gentle undulation and discovering that token cooperation did nothing to increase her lingering pain and certainly did not detract from the wisps of pleasure that were dancing miraculously out over her softly perspiring flesh. She dropped her arms downward, caressing softly over her husband's laboring shoulders and back, smothering soft kisses of love and gratitude on his face as she began to arch and hunch her nakedly squirming ass-cheeks more swiftly.
"Yes," she purred softly. "Yesss, do it to me. Fuck me!"
She said it, that word she never said in the presence of any man, that word which she'd spoken before only secretly to herself or to her most intimate girlfriends, that word that since her puberty had been for her the source of so much guilt and dread and grudging fascination. She'd said it, somehow meant it in the delirium and excitement of the moment. And then before she knew it; Bob was racking her body with a series of shattering staccato lunges, grunting like an animal and pistoning the hardness of his cock so rapidly in and out of the still tender and burning hole of her pussy that the shear fury of the assault snapped her completely back to reality. And as she opened her eyes to stare up in shame and disappointment she saw the sudden sinking on his face, heard the soft swear word as he lost control and the first thick droplets of his hotly spurting cum went splashing far up into the depths of her belly.
"Oh please," Cathy whimpered, her body stiff and motionless beneath him as Bob continued the relentless slamming into her ravished inner thighs, building to a crescendo, then passing his peak, slacking gradually off until finally he sagged, exhausted and motionless on her.
"Cathy. Are you all right. Cathy. Cathy!"
Her husband's voice seemed to come to her ears from a great distance. Then suddenly she was snapped back to the present. She blinked, looking around at the torrent of blinding rain.
"What happened?" he said.
"Hunh?"
"What were you thinking about. You looked… gone."
"N-nothing," she replied, wondering why she couldn't just tell him the truth. "I was just… looking at the rain."
CHAPTER TWO
Bob Mason squinted into the thick sheets of rain. Before them, a gasoline truck crept along at a snail's pace. Behind them, bearing down, was a semi with a load of new Fords. They passed, on their left, one of the better known vineyard's tasting room, a landmark he'd been looking for. Over the next rolling hill a large gray structure materialized gradually out of the storm, a giant old barn which long ago had lost all evidence of having ever worn a coat of paint. Faded letter's above the loft at one end of the structure read Dr. Jackson's Special Syrup, and advertisement dating back to prohibition, for a cure-all medication, no longer existent, which like so many other medications of that period owed whatever success it had enjoyed to the fact that it consisted of something in the area of fifty percent alcohol. He put on the blinker to signal a left turn and slowed, waiting for a clearance in the oncoming traffic.
"Bob?" Cathy said beside him in a hesitant voice.
"Yeah, hon'?"
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a kind of desperation in her face.
"Do we really have to stop?"
"We don't have to, but there's no reason why not either? Why?"
"I don't know. The rain. Oh, I don't know."
In the other lane the line of the cars broke and he cut swiftly across onto a gravel road running between rows of vines. Before them loomed the gray shadow of the barn. Beyond it, up a hill, he could just make out the red brick ranch-style house that had replaced the old wooden home he'd known when he used to come here, as a small boy, with his father.
Relieved of the pressure of driving under these almost intolerable conditions on the congested highway, Bob sighed, glancing at his troubled young wife with a reassuring smile. He let his gaze drift slowly down the length of her slender body teasingly outlined in her loosely clinging cotton dress, then dropped his right hand casually onto her thigh. He frowned as she tensed slightly beneath his touch.
"Watch the ditch," she said.
"I am watching the ditch." He glanced out at the deep drainage ditch that flanked the gravel road on his left, then squeezed Cathy's thigh and looked back at her strained but lovely face. "Relax, baby. Anyway, you must know the real reason I wanted to stop here? Hunh?"
"Well what do you think?"
"I don't know."
"Because I wanted to show you off to Giulio. I'm proud of you, nitwit."
She sat sulking, refusing to look at him. He squeezed her thigh again. Before them on the gravel road a small wooden bridge appeared. He slowed to cross it, noting that the little creek it crossed was flowing deep and swift, a torrent of swirling brown water.
"What's the matter?" he said, eyes again on his wife.
"Nothing." She stared straight ahead, sulking. Then suddenly her eyes widened. "Bob!"
He turned his own gaze back to the bending road, cut sharp to the right to avoid going into the ditch with the left front tire. He felt the tail-end spinning in the gravel and mud, swinging hard to the left. He tried to cut back that way to correct it. Beside him Cathy screamed. He had to cut again to the right. He could feel the car fish-tailing. There was a sudden drop, cut short, like a fall in a dream that stops suddenly when one awakes. They were stopped dead, tires still spinning, black smoke pouring from the rear of the car where the rubber burned. He jammed it into first, gave it gas. Nothing happened. He cursed under his breath and cut the engine, staring angrily ahead into the falling rain. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Cathy, glaring at him as if he's just confessed to some heinous crime.
"Damn it," he said finally, turning to look at her sheepishly.
"I knew it," she said.
He felt the anger surge in his chest, half at her, half at himself. "You knew what?"
"I knew something would happen if we stopped here. I felt it."
"Yeah. Well it's not the end of the world!"
He slung the door open and stepped suddenly out into the pouring rain, almost slipping into the ditch himself before he seized the door handle to maintain his balance. He bent over and peered at the back rear tire, which sat completely off the road and into the ditch, washed over by the brown rushing water. He stood staring downward, as though oblivious to the storm. His gaze drifted slowly across the ditch and fixed at last on an old grayed piece of lumber lying there in the mud. Then he walked around the car, conscious of Cathy still glaring at him sulkily, leaped the ditch and retrieved the board and did his best to jam it up beneath the left rear tire. Then he jumped back over the ditch and moved around again to climb, soaking wet, back behind the wheel.
"I'll give it a try," he said. "But anyway it's not the end of the goddamn world. Giulio can tow us out with his tractor if he has to…" He paused, staring impatiently at his sulking wife. "Honey, what's the matter with you? Tell me."
"There's nothing the matter with me," she hissed, staring at him through eyes that were glossed with tears.
Then, as he started to reach out to touch her arm she suddenly flung the door open, jumped from the car into the sweeping rain, and started at a run up the road toward the barn. Bob cursed under his breath, staring after her for a moment, then angrily started the engine, jammed the transmission into first, and resumed the futile spinning of the tires.
Behind her Cathy could hear the racing of the engine. Instantly she felt drenched to the bone. Her heart was pounding so furiously she thought it would explode. A strange, involuntary animal sound issued from her throat, half the sound of breathing, half horrible lunatic wail. It was her breathing and her crying, merged as one entity, as though a primitive communication of a most horrible and primal despair. She was half running and half stumbling along in the blinding, wind-swept rain. Though her voice-breath said one thing, her mind was saying another, over and over and over, perhaps not really a separate thought, but rather a mental, silent and more sophisticated verbalization of the waiclass="underline"