Which even caused Dora to stammeringly suggest, "Uh, Jane, I don't like to tell you this, but you know, your skirt, uh, it's all the way up, dear, and…"
Only to have Jane cut her off with a lazy, "Oh yes, dear, but it's so unseasonably warm today, don't you think?"
Watching her old girl friend puffing easily on her long ebony cigarette holder, Dora didn't actually know what to think. This was not the same shy, ugly-duckling girl she had known for so many years. This was a confident, worldly, self-possessed sophisticate who would be completely at ease anywhere. Confident and sexually aware. What did she know – that Dora didn't? – or what had she learned? The troubled redhead was piqued, like any woman, to think that there might be someone else around who was more sensually attuned than she herself. Did Jane need help in some way? Or, on the other hand, was it she herself, Dora, who could benefit from Jane? The picture was confused. She would have to learn more.
"Well then," Dora said at last after all this pondering, which in reality took scarcely a few seconds, "tell us about what you've been up to. You look positively ravishing!" She looked up from under eyelids, adding slyly, "You haven't taken a lover, have you?"
Jane's face solidified out of its previously relaxed expression, her eyes and eyebrows narrowing. "Whatever made you say that, Dora?" she asked.
So! She had struck home with very first parry! Of course, what else could it be!?
But now this realization that her instincts had been correct after all made her unaccountably nervous, and her coffee cup fairly rattled in the dish as she attempted to lift it.
"Well, I don't know, dear… It just seemed that you're awfully vivacious today, for some reason. Don't get upset."
Jane looked down at her black-gloved hands and turned them in her lap as if studying them. It seemed as if she were blushing slightly, but there was so much artificial rose in her cheeks that it was really difficult to tell for certain. Dora wondered if she'd gaffed terribly. But no, the signs were all there. Oooh, her loins tingled as a lewd vision arose in her sex-obsessed brain of her friend Jane being ravished by some man other than her husband. Maybe it was a big burly factory worker she was having an affair with, or a tennis pro, or…
Dora found her breath coming heatedly. Until this very moment she hadn't been prepared to fully acknowledge what dire straits she herself was in, and how maddening her sexual thoughts had become recently. But now the thought of Jane committing adultery… She had never in her life considered having anyone besides her wonderful Guy, although she had heard rumors that some wives occasionally strayed. She had always been faithful, however, and indeed even disinterested in anyone else. When Guy's enormous member was filling her up, pumping into her, the rest of the universe disappeared and that was all she could think of. And after her usual mind-splitting orgasms she was usually dead to the world and hopelessly relaxed and wafting on a cloud for days afterward.
Except that recently those climaxes of mind-bending, shattering sweetness were becoming increasingly few and far between. She had become used to multiple orgasms with Guy through the years, truly fantastic flights whereby one orgasm took off from the plateau left by the last. This morning she had managed, by working very hard in her thoughts, to screw her loins up to feverish anticipatory pitch and break through to some sort of orgasm, but it was very far from the flesh-frazzling sort of fire she had become used to being burned up alive in.
No, something had gone out of their relationship. Guy's foreplay had diminished as his desire for darkness had escalated, and occasionally she thought she caught him murmuring someone else's name. There was something not quite right about the whole thing when they made love now. It was as if he was thinking of someone else, mentally having intercourse with someone else.
And now, the startling revelation that Jane Hammond – of all people – had discarded a normally frumpy personality through the inspiration of illicit behavior. It was something that bore thinking about, if only briefly. She had to know more.
"No, I haven't taken offense, Dora," Jane looked up at her with sparkling, intelligent green eyes. "It's just that I would have thought that you'd be the last person to be capable of understanding."
Now it was Dora's turn to blush and look down ungracefully at her coffee cup from that hard, sophisticated stare. Jane really made her feel like a country bumpkin all of a sudden, all thumbs and incapable of dressing properly. She touched a hand nervously to her hair. "Well, of course…" Then abruptly she decided to face the whole thing head on, and she looked directly, demandingly into her old school friend's eyes. "But just what do you mean by that, Jane? I want you to tell me exactly."
Jane smiled tolerantly. She gestured with a black-gloved hand. "But you know, dear – you and Guy seem to have such a good thing going, you probably can't comprehend that anyone might enjoy the sexual company of someone other than her husband. But it's true, believe me. It's very possible indeed."
"But with who?" Dora couldn't keep the tremor out of her voice. This mental voyeurism was undeniably exciting. All kinds of lewd pictures formed in her mind of Jane with other men like Jack Hammond. In all kinds of positions… She gulped and something seemed to stick in her throat.
But Jane only waved a hand airily, her lengthy cigarette holder with its king-size cigarette faintly reminiscent of movie femme fatales of the 1940's. "Oh, you'd be surprised, dear. But surely you don't want to know all of the gory details?"
"Well, I…" Dora blushed again and looked down at her hands. This was the telling moment. Should she say anything further, or allude to her own sexual problems. Or admit her blatantly prurient interest in hearing whatever tales of sexual debauchery Jane might care to provide?
She decided to take the plunge.
"Yes," she admitted as frankly as she could, looking at Jane without flinching. "I would like to hear all the – as you put it – 'gory' details. Tell me more, Jane."
Jane looked at her strangely, and she was aware that her voice had responded with a trace of over eagerness. But she didn't care. Her loins were vaguely uncomfortable, and a sickly sweet sensation pervaded them, as Jane finally launched into the amazing tale through which she had finally arrived at her steep descent from grace.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Well, you may remember, dear, how I used to be," Jane looked at her significantly. "Rather ungainly and ill-at-ease among people. A dutiful wife who wouldn't have dreamed of ever entertaining a naughty thought, let alone carrying on with another man."
"Yes, go on."
"Well, this was all well and good so long as there was no pressure for me to change. I performed – let's say I acquiesced – in all my sexual duties just as a good wife should and as I expected Jack expected me to."
"What then happened?"
"Let me finish. All right then, so there I was being the perfect demure little home help. And all the time it wasn't what Jack wanted at all!"
Dora looked down at her hands. And maybe she wasn't what Guy wanted anymore, either. He was thinking of someone else. Where had she gone wrong? "How did you find out?" she asked quietly.
Jane shrugged. "Well, there was no mystery about it – Jack simply came and told me." Dora's eyes widened. "He told you?"
"Yes, my dear. He said quite bluntly – and rightly, too, I realize now from hindsight – that I was not satisfactory in bed, and that he wondered if I would like to make a new arrangement with our lives."
"What – what did you say to that?" Dora breathed, mesmerized by the turn their conversation was taking.