One of my hands was under her now, kneading the marshmallow flesh of her derriere. She leaned forward and tickled the underside of my scrotum. I moved forward, wedging my penis between her trembling thighs, probing toward that secret moist place, but unable to reach it.
Her legs were opening and closing, revealing the triangle of red curls with the erect, maroon clitty peeping out of them, and the soft love-lips puckering avidly. I stared and forgot all about the storm blowing up around us. Rarely have I seen such an eager beaver!
But the damn Crow’s Nest just hadn’t been designed for lovemaking. It was like trying to make out in the front seat of a Volkswagen. No matter how we shifted, we couldn’t seem to mesh gears.
We thrashed around in frustration. I managed to force it into the deep cleft between her breasts, but that didn’t satisfy Blaze. And, while it was exciting, I too was bent on other, more succulent game. Finally I figured out a way.
I stood up again, almost flying out of the wildly tossing Crow’s Nest in my impatience. I arranged Blaze on her back so that her arms and legs stuck up over the sides of the Crow’s Nest. Then I lowered myself, kneeling, until I’d wedged my knees under her bottom. By pressing forward this way, I was able to gain access to her waiting, palpitating love-tunnel.
Forcing myself to slow down, I gently pinched at the nipples of her breasts. Blaze hardly seemed to notice. Her eyes were riveted on the juncture of her widespread legs, staring as the stiff battering ram came closer and closer. The tip grazed her fever-hot clitty, and she winced. When I moved forward another half-inch, she moaned deep in her throat and her vagina lips nipped urgently at the crest of my organ. Her muscles relaxed and I slid in to the hilt. Blaze bucked and tightened around me like a vise. I let her feel the full force of my weight, and her teeth bit into my shoulder hard. She fought back, countering each of my lunges with equal force until a savage rhythm had been established between us.
Deep and fierce, the two of us kept pounding away. The skies opened up now, and the rain pelted our hot bodies, an occasional flash of lightning illuminating our writhing limbs, deep thunder pronouncing a judgment that we ignored. I don’t know if it was the pot, or the storm, or just one of those times of passion that come so rarely, but we plunged into an oblivion that was a battle of lusts, and stayed there for a long while, our entire beings concentrated on the joining of our bodies.
We were both screaming wordlessly now. Her teeth had stabbed deep into the flesh of my shoulder. It was bleeding and her lips seemed to savor the blood. My hand was twisting her breast so hard that she was crying with the pain. And at the same time, exultation mounted on her tear-streaked face, and on mine. There was a sky-splitting flash of lightning followed by a nuclear thunderclap, and between the two, in those couple of seconds, we fired off our lust at each other in a discharge that continued past the echo of the thunder. Finally we fell apart like two evenly matched warriors who have vanquished one another on the field of battle.
Not too far apart, of course. The Crow’s Nest was too confining to permit that. Actually, we were still sprawled over one another, spent, exhausted. We lay that way a long time with the wind howling over us and the rain drenching us. And then the ship took an unexpected lurch that seemed to send the Crow’s Nest hurtling into space, and I clicked back fast into full awareness.
For a minute I thought it wouldn’t, but at the last split second the ship righted itself. The mast came back up to a vertical position. The Crow’s Nest felt a little less like a roller coaster on the down-plunge.
“We’d better get out of here!” I told Blaze.
No answer. Her face was white and staring. She was obviously incapable of movement. Still, if I left her there, the next deep roll of the ship might well dump her out of the Crow’s Nest. “I’m going to go for help,” I explained to her. “You stay here. I’ll lash you to the mast.”
Still no answer. Blaze was in a trance of pure terror. Using my pants and jacket, I rigged a harness for Blaze and secured it to the mast and the cross-brace. It let her stay in the Crow’s Nest, but if the Crow’s Nest should be torn away by the wind, she’d still be tied to the mast. Hopefully, the mast itself wouldn’t snap.
I slipped on my jockey shorts and undershirt and started down the rope ladder. About a third of the way down, the ship rolled crazily, the rope-ladder swung out, and the wind hit me like an atomic blast. My shorts and undershirt were peeled away in an instant. I was almost peeled off the ladder myself. Only by wrapping my legs around the spar was I able to keep from falling.
It passed and I continued downward. Twice more I was almost blown away. Finally, my feet touched the deck.
But the deck was slick with rain and sea-water. It slid out from under me and I went hurtling toward the blackness. The Lascivia was listing sharply to port. I was being flung over the side! And there was nothing I could do to brake myself!
Suddenly, something grabbed my ankle and yanked hard. I skidded to a halt, my outflung body dangling over the depths. My other ankle was grabbed, and I was pulled to safety. I flopped over and found myself in the shelter of a cabin, looking up at Mister Jewish and Chief Purser Yenta.
Mister Jewish struggled to close the door against the storm. Yenta looked at me and shook his head ruefully. “Mr. Victor! You simply must keep your exhibitionism under control until this storm is over!”
“Exhibitionism?” I gasped, trying to get my breath back.
Yenta’s eyes roamed over my nude body.
“The wind tore off my clothes,” I explained weakly.
“So you went looking for them, naked, in the middle of a hurricane?” Yenta was skeptical.
“Hurricane? I thought we weren’t going into the hurricane. I thought the Captain decided to avoid it.”
“He did.” Mister Jewish spoke for the first time. “Our course was set to miss it by at least fifty miles.”
“Then what happened?”
“Someone sabotaged the ship’s compass. It’s ten degrees off. By the time we discovered it, we were in the middle of the storm.”
“But whoever did that,” I babbled, “put his own neck in the noose along with everybody else on board. Why would anybody do that? And who? Who'd do a thing like that?”
“I’ve got my ideas!” Mister Jewish was looking straight at me. It wasn’t a friendly look. It was the kind of a look a hanging judge has just before he pronounces a gallows sentence. “One man turns up every time something happens aboard this ship. One man is always right there. And it’s always the same man!”
There was no missing his meaning! He meant me!
CHAPTER TEN
The storm raged. The sea was a spinning roulette wheel, the Lascivia a little steel ball bouncing erratically, at the mercy of the angry Gods of Fate. Their displeasure had cracked the skies wide open and the vessel was being whipped brutally by wind and rain and overwhelming tidal waves. It was a bitch!
I tried to tell Mister Jewish that Blaze Buxbocks was stuck up in the Crow’s Nest, but‘ he wouldn’t listen. His suspicion of me had poisoned his mind, and he wasn’t about to take action on anything I said. Besides which, he let me know tersely, he couldn’t spare a man to look into the matter; even if he could, he wasn’t about to risk one of his men’s lives by sending him aloft in a hurricane.
My only recourse was to appeal to the Captain. I followed along when Mister Jewish went back to the wheelhouse. But the way things were there, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
Captain Maldemerde was hysterical. There’s no other word for it. He was vacillating between quivering, pasty-faced terror and the assertion of his authority by the bellowing of contradictory orders. Click-click.