The thrum of the engines, the lapping of the ocean against the luxury liner cutting through it, made us speak up a little. Just a little.
“Take my jacket,” I said.
“No…I’d rather just snuggle.”
“Be my guest.”
I slipped my arm around her and drew her close; her bare arm did feel cold, gooseflesh tickling my fingers. Her perfume tickled my nose.
“You smell good,” I said.
“Chanel,” she said.
“What number?”
“Number Five. You’ve been around, haven’t you?”
“I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.”
She laughed a little; it had a musical sound. “I can’t help liking you.”
“Why fight it? Do you do anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, go to school, or…do rich girls like you ever work?”
“Of course we work! If we want to.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t want to…. But maybe I’ll have to, someday. I’m not so rich, you know. We got hit hard in the Crash.”
“I didn’t feel a thing.”
She flashed me a quick frown. “Don’t be smug. It’s not a joke, people jumping out of windows.”
“I know it isn’t. How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Are you in school?”
“I might go to college. I wasn’t planning to, but…”
“What happened?”
“I was engaged to this boy.”
“You were?”
“He met someone else.”
“Not someone prettier. That wouldn’t be possible.”
Her eyes studied the dark water. “He went to Europe. Met her on the Queen Mary.”
“Ah. Shipboard romance.”
“Maybe it started that way. He’s engaged to her, now.”
“I know an excellent way for you to get back at him.”
“How’s that?”
And when her head was tilted up to look at me while she asked that question, I kissed her. It started out gentle and sweet, but then it got hot and deep, and when we parted, we were both damn near panting. I leaned over the rail and caught my breath and watched whitecaps rolling over the inky sea.
“You kissed fellas before,” I noted.
“Once or twice,” she said, and she kissed me again.
Her stateroom was just across the hall from mine, but as we paused there, I took a moment from us pawing each other and said breathlessly, “I gotta get something from my room.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You know…something.”
“What…Sheiks?” She swatted the air. “I have some in my train case.”
I guess you’ve guessed by now she wasn’t a virgin. But she wasn’t all that experienced, either; she seemed surprised when, after a while, deep inside of her, I rolled with her, moving her around and up on top. I had a feeling her former fiancé had been strictly a missionary position sort of guy.
But she soon got the swing of it, and was liking riding rather than being ridden. Her eyes were half-hooded, as if she were tipsy with desire, her body washed with ivory from the porthole, the shadows of the half-open shutters making an exquisite pattern on the smooth planes of her body as she leaned forward, hips grinding, breasts swaying. Those breasts, lovely, perfectly conical, not big, not small, were peaked with large, swollen aureoles, like those of an adolescent girl just entering puberty. She was well out of puberty, however, and the smooth warmth of her around me, the movie star loveliness of her hovering over me, turned me tipsy, too….
She slipped out of bed, and into the bathroom while I plucked a tissue from the nightstand to dispose of the lambskin armor she’d provided me. Two or three minutes later, she returned, and slipped the compact curves of her flawless young body into her undergarment, a creamy little teddy, got herself a Camel from her purse on a bamboo chair, and lighted the ciggie up with a tiny silver lighter.
“You want a tailor-made?” she asked.
“No. It’s one bad habit I haven’t got around to.”
“We used to roll ’em, back at girls’ school.” She inhaled, exhaled, the blue smoke drifting like vapor. “You got anything to nip at?”
“There’s a flask in my jacket pocket…no, the other pocket.”
Cigarette dangling from the Kewpie mouth, she unscrewed the cap on the silver flask and had a jolt. “Ah! Demon rum. Want some?”
“Sure. Bring it back to bed with you.”
And she did, passing me the flask as she eased under the covers next to me.
“You must think I’m terribly wicked,” she said. “Just a little tramp.”
I sipped the rum. “I certainly won’t respect you in the morning.”
She knew I was kidding, but she asked anyway, “You won’t?”
“Not some little trollop who sleeps with the first good-lookin’ kike who comes along.”
She yelped a laugh, and grabbed a pillow and hit me with it; I protected the flask so as not to spill any of its precious contents.
“You’re an awful person!”
“Better you figure that out now than later.”
She put her pillow back in place, and snuggled against me, again. “I suppose you think we’ll be doing this every night of the trip.”
“I have nothing else planned.”
“I’m really normally a very good girl.”
“Good, hell. You’re great.”
“You want me to hit you again?” she asked, reaching for the pillow. But she left it in its place, and settled back against it and me and said, “You just pushed the right button, that’s all.”
I slipped a hand over one silk-covered bosom and touched a forefinger to a puffy nipple ever so gently. “Hope to shout…”
“Awful person,” she said, and blew out smoke, and French-kissed me. It was a smoky, rum-tinged kiss, but nice. And memorable. Funny how much this rich little good girl kissed like some of the poor little nasty girls I’d run across.
“Poor Thalo,” she sighed, taking the flask from me.
“What?”
“Sex relations can be so wonderful. So much fun.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
She swigged, wiped her mouth with a hand. “To have it ruined…by some awful greasy native beasts.” She shuddered. “Just to think of it makes me want to run and hide….”
“What was she like?”
“Thalo?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean, growing up together?”
“Yeah. Docile, quiet…?”
“Thalo! Not hardly! You think it’s a bowl of cherries, being rich. But you more or less have to raise yourself. Not that I’m complaining. Those days at Bayport, they were something….”
“Bayport?”
“It’s a little community on the South Shore of Long Island. Thalo’s parents have a summer home there. It’s like a park, really—that big house, lake, woods…. We used to go bareback riding…and I do mean bare.”
“No parents around to object to such shenanigans?”
Another swig. “They were gone most of the time—social functions, foreign jaunts. The house was run by the Filipino domestics, who Thalo didn’t have to answer to. Glorious days, really.”
“You went to school together, too?”
“Yes—Hillside in Norwalk, then, later, National Cathedral, in Washington. Strict schools, but summers were madcap; we ran wild. Lived in our bathing suits all summer.”
She handed me the flask and got out of bed; a lovely thing in that teddy, completely unselfconscious in her near nudity.
“We had this old Ford,” she said, fishing another smoke from her purse, “that we painted up with all sorts of colors and crazy sayings. Rode around with our feet and legs hanging out of the car. Tore around, regular little speed demons.”
“Never got picked up? Never lost your license?”
She lighted up the new ciggie. “Oh, we didn’t have licenses. We weren’t old enough.”
Soon she was back in bed with me, the orange eye of her cigarette staring in the darkness.
“I shouldn’t say this, but…she used to love it.”
“Love what?”
“It. You know—it! Doing it? Boys from our set, visiting their own parents, they’d come to that big house…we had the run of the place…come midnight we’d go skinny-dipping in the lake….”