“My breasts,” she moaned. “Kiss them, Johnny. Kiss them and play with them.”
He bent over her and took a breast in his hands. He brought it to his mouth and pressed his lips to the warm sweet flesh. She didn’t use perfume but she had something that was better than perfume. She smelled like a woman aroused to go. It wasn’t a smell he recognized but he knew its significance at once.
His lips raced over her breasts. He kissed the nipples and her whole body began to shiver and shake.
“Kiss them, Johnny. As hard as you can—”
He kissed each nipple in turn, taking each tiny turret between his lips and working hard on it. He bit her experimentally once or twice and was rewarded with a small gasp of passion.
“Now touch me. There, that’s right. God, that feels good. Oh, you don’t know how good it feels. It’s wonderful. It’s the nicest feeling there is. Touch me some more. That’s right, oh, God, it feels good it—”
His heart was beating like a triphammer and his brain was spinning dizzily. He was going to have her now. He was ready, she was ready, and—
She took hold of him. “Oh, touch me,” she breathed. “But not with your hands, it’s nice with your hands but that’s enough now, enough with the hands, touch me with this! Oh, come on, come on Johnny baby, that’s right, oh, yes, oh yes, oh that’s right, that’s the way, oh God!”
He fell on her, aching for her, and her breasts cushioned his fall. He had trouble for a moment but her hand helped him, following the directions on the accompanying printed sheet and neatly joining plug A to socket B.
Once the connection was made it damn near electrocuted both of them.
Her mouth was at his ear, kissing him, mumbling words of encouragement and endearment to him. Her thighs were locked around his hips in a death-grip that was life itself and her arms were taut as bands of structured steel around his chest.
They moved.
They moved together, and his body learned movements it had never known before. All at once he knew everything he was supposed to do and he did it flawlessly. She was an unobtrusive teacher, showing him things as they went along, teaching him little tricks that sent his blood boiling and that urged him on to bigger and better things.
He moved again and again and the world raced by them. It got better and better and he thought he was going to die from the sheer pleasure of it. It was like nothing he had ever dreamed of, nothing he could possibly have imagined. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever experienced, the most wonderful thing in the entire world.
It got increasingly better, until the height was reached by both of them at once. Together they exploded. Her legs squeezed him and nearly cut him in two. Her nails raked his back and drew blood. He never felt the pain.
He bit her shoulder. His hands were on her buttocks when it happened for them and he squeezed them so that they were black and blue for three days.
And she never felt the pain either.
Then it was over. Slowly the world came back to normal again. He lay with her for a long time, unable to move, and she didn’t mind his weight. Finally after what seemed like at least a month, he moved away from her.
She sighed.
“Johnny,” she whispered. “God. Johnny.”
He didn’t say anything. She stood up and slipped her slippers on, reached for another nightgown.
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
“Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t do anything. Just stay there. I’ll be right back.”
His eyes questioned her.
“It’s all right,” she told him. “Just stay here. I have to go in the kitchen for a minute.”
“To feed the kid?”
“To hell with the bastard,” she snapped. “No, not to feed the kid. I’m going to bring you some milk. A whole goddamned quart of it.”
She brought him the milk. And then they went back to bed together, twice more that morning, and she taught him things most men never learn if they live to be a hundred. He left her apartment exhausted, but a man.
He came back frequently after that. Always she had a glass of milk for him when he walked in the door and another after he made love to her.
On his third visit he learned that her name was Joan Barber. She had not volunteered the information before that and he had never thought of asking her. It didn’t much matter to him what her name was.
Eventually she took to giving him a dollar or two when they were together. She handed him the money without saying anything and he took it without thanking her. He figured that that was the way their relationship was. She wanted him, and she knew that he didn’t have much money. So she slipped him a dollar now and then.
For four months he saw her two or three times a week. They made phenomenal love during those four months. He learned a great deal — enough so that he could tell quickly what girls were ready for him and what ones were not. He managed to find four who were, during the time he was seeing Joan Barber. One had been a virgin before he got to her.
He changed that.
After four months his visits had dropped off to twice a week at the most, occasionally only once a week. Then one morning he went to her apartment and she wasn’t there. He checked the next day and found out that she and her husband had moved to another apartment in another section of town.
He never saw her again. He didn’t much care. As far as he was concerned she was just a broad, pure and simple. His first one, as it happened, but just a broad.
Chapter Two
He laughed, remembering the first time with Joan Barber. Christ, what a green punk he’d been! Well, there had to be a first time for everything. And that had been the first time for him. There was a lot of water over the dam since then.
His stomach reminded him that he was hungry. He sat upright on the bed, kneading his stomach with strong fingers. He guessed that it was about seven o’clock. It was late April and the air was warm out. He got up from the bed and left the room. He didn’t even bother shutting the door after him. There was nothing there for anybody to steal.
He hurried down the stairs, taking them two at a time again and passing in rapid succession the smells of alcohol and garlic and cabbage. He left the building and felt in his pockets for a cigarette. There was only one Lucky left in the pack. He took it out and put it between his lips, then crumpled the pack and flipped it into 99th Street.
A cleaner New York is up to you, he thought scornfully. Cast your ballot here for a cleaner New York. And did you make New York dirty today?
Nuts, he thought. He found a pack of matches in another pocket, yanked one out and scratched it into flame, cupping his hands for the light. He sucked smoke into his lungs and exhaled. He left the cigarette between his lips and headed down the street, his hands plunged into the pockets of his dungarees, his body loping easily as he walked.
Food.
A meal.
Money.
And their source: a woman.
He remembered the last woman and grimaced distastefully. She’d been old, with breasts that sagged to her waist. And she barely had a waist. It was almost as wide as her hips.
And that wasn’t all that was too wide.
He hawked and spat. The woman wasn’t the worst of it: She lived in a ratty apartment on Amsterdam and her brats were squalling away in the other room while they were going at it. The whole place reeked of cooking smells. And afterward, when she’d had the decency to go to sleep so he could go through her pocketbook, all he’d gotten for his trouble was a lousy five bucks.