Snell focused the beam on her identification tag. “Ethel Laidlaw.” He noted that she was small-breasted. But young enough so that they were still fairly firm. Firm little breasts. One could make a case for them, too.
“So,” he said, “Ethel Laidlaw. What is Ethel Laidlaw doing here now?” Snell stood close to her, emphasizing the disparity in their sizes. He was so big while she was so small. He liked to impress people with his bulk.
“Oh, I’m so embarrassed.”
“Now, why’s that, little lady?” Snell’s male-chauvinist-pig tendencies were beginning to blossom again.
“Well, I just wanted to meet you. And when you were on my floor, you walked by so quickly . . .”
“Wanted to meet me, eh?” Snell leaned forward, putting one hand against the wall and, in a way, trapping her. “Whatever would you want to do that for?”
“Well . . . because you’re a hero. I mean . . . you rescued Sister Eileen the other night . . .”
“Well, little honey, you don’t have to hide in the shadows to meet me. I’m just like everybody else. Put my pants on one leg at a time. Take ’em off the same way.” Snell tried to insert extra meaning in the statement. “Why, I wouldn’t even known you were here if you hadn’t dropped something. What was it you dropped, anyway?”
“Oh . . .” Ethel hadn’t dropped anything; she didn’t know what had been dropped. “My pen . . . I dropped my pen.” She held it up to prove that, if nothing else, she did indeed have a pen.
“It didn’t sound like a pen.” But, what the hell; who cared? It might just be possible that Ethel Laidlaw was in need of God’s greatest gift to women. “But, never mind. Well, here I am. Now you’ve met me, what do you think?”
“Well, there’s this reputation you got.”
“Yeah? No kiddin’.”
“Well, people talk. You know.”
“Yeah? What’re they sayin’?”
“Oh, I couldn’t repeat it.” She blushed.
“You can tell me. I mean, my God, it’s my reputation.” Is it possible she’s a virgin, he wondered.
“Well, there’s talk . . .”
“Yeah . . .?”
“Something about . . . a maneuver . . .?”
Damn! I haven’t even been able to demonstrate it fully to anyone here yet. And already they’re talkin’ about it. “So, what have you heard about it?”
“Only that it’s . . . uh . . . unique.”
“Well, you know, it is. I only . . . uh . . . do it with very special people.”
“Oh.” Blush.
“Would . . . uh . . . you be . . . uh . . . interested?”
“Oh, Mr. Snell! Me?”
“George.”
“George.”
“Once we get it together, baby, you will never be formal again.”
“Oh, George!”
“Oh, Ethel!” Snell began fumbling, rather expertly, with the buttons of her uniform.
“Wait!”
“Wait?”
“Yes, wait! I have an idea.”
‘An idea? Ethel, this is no time for thinking.”
“Well, yes. As a matter of fact, it is, George.”
“Well, what?”
“Don’t you think we ought to find a bed?”
“A bed.”
“Don’t you need something like a bed for your . . . maneuver?”
“Now that you mention it . . .”
“The pastoral care department.”
“Pastoral care?”
“They’ve got an empty bed. In an empty room.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s get there.”
Pastoral care was only a short distance down the hall. They got there in world-record time.
Snell returned his concentration to Ethel’s buttons.
As he reached bra depth, Ethel said urgently, “Wait!”
“Again!”
“I’ve got another idea.”
“Ethel, has anyone told you you think too much?”
“It’s just something to make it better.”
“Baby, nothing make it better than I do!”
“I think it might.”
Snell considered the possibility that this simple matter was getting entirely too cluttered. “Well, what is it?”
“I can’t say it.”
“You can’t—!” On the other hand, this might be interesting. If Ethel were, as he suspected, a virgin, she may have been harboring fantasies. Snell always fancied fantasies and indulged them whenever possible. “But, if you can’t . . .”
“Let me whisper it to you.”
“Okay.”
Snell lowered his massive head to Ethel’s rosebud mouth and listened.
“Yeah . . . okay . . .” A smile began to form. “Well, why not . . . why the hell not?”
Snell stepped back from Ethel and began to disrobe himself, slowly, sensuously. It was a male striptease. Ethel appeared to be enjoying it immensely. But she sat there watching him without removing a stitch of her own clothing.
At last, George stood stark-naked. “Baby, I’m ready!” There was no doubting that truth. “Let’s go!”
“No! No! The rest of it too!”
“Oh . . . God . . . okay.”
After all, her suggestion seemed to be working so far. George found that his striptease, while she remained completely clothed, was a real and rare stimulant. Why not go along with the rest of her fantasy?
Leaving his uniform—indeed, all his clothing—on the chair next to the bed, Snell retreated to the bathroom and turned on the shower. He’d never tried anything like this before. The plan called for him to return soaking wet. She would be clad in her underclothing, which he would rip from her body. He, a Beast from the Ocean’s depths, taking her—the Earth Woman.
And, of course added to all this, like a preternatural gift, would be . . . the maneuver.
He completed the shower, stepped out, and was about to dry himself when he recalled he was supposed to present himself fresh from the Ocean. Kinky. He liked that in a woman.
“Aha!” He bounded into the room in a mikadoesque stance. By anyone’s standards, he was ready.
“Aha! Ethel! Prepare to meet your fate . . . Ethel? Ethel?”
She hadn’t mentioned anything about hiding. Besides, that was carrying this thing just a bit too far, dammit! There was such a thing as too much foreplay.
“Ethel?” He looked in the closet. He looked in the two adjoining offices. “Ethel?” He looked under the bed. That was it. There was no place left to hide.
She was not there. Could you believe it? After all, she was the one at whose initiative this whole thing had begun. Now she was nowhere to be found.
And that was by no means all.
His clothing was gone. All his clothing.
Whatinhell am I gonna do now? There’s nothing left. And I didn’t get to use the maneuver. In fact, I haven’t used it since I got to this rotten place. Use it or lose it.
But for the present, he had to get out of here, saving as much face as possible.
Reacting as much from panic as anything else, he stripped the bed of its brown blanket, which he wrapped around himself. Cautiously, he let himself out of the room. Step by step, he inched along the welcome shadows of the corridor. When he reached the seemingly empty lobby, he knew he would have to make a dash for it. The switchboard operator was the sole inhabitant of the brightly lit foyer. She seemed absorbed in a paperback romance.
He made a break for it, bare feet hardly making a sound as he pitterpattered over the terrazzo floor. No sooner was he outside the building than the bone-chilling cold of a January night hit his basically bare body with Arctic force. Cursing Ethel, he danced his way across the pavement and through the parking lot as if proving his faith over hot coals.
George Snell, macho man that he was, never locked his car. So it was no problem for him to hot-wire the vehicle and get the heat going. For the first time in many minutes he could now relax slightly. He would drive home, don his other uniform, and get back here to try to retrieve the missing uniform at least in time to check out.