Vera looked at the woman. She felt a sudden lump in her throat. This was the "other woman". The one Paul had confided in the past year. The one who'd heard all she should have heard, the one he'd forsaken her.
She suddenly loved old Martha. There couldn't be any jealousy over this kindly soul. There could only be a feeling of inadequacy in that the woman had offered him more comfort than Vera could have given him-more understanding about the heavy decisions over the motel. Perhaps she had been the one to tell him to sign his stock over before he died. She wanted to ask. One day, she'd come back and talk to Martha and learn what had happened to Paul the past year-what had happened to him inside, the things he couldn't talk to his wife about any more.
"The motel? I told him to burn it down. I came here forty years ago to get away from the damn things and all the people they bring. I don't want Loon Key to become a tourist trap. I want it to stay bare and raw, just the way it was made to be." She went on. Max slid a glance towards Vera and smirked. An old bird-watcher nut who was going senile, that's what he thought of her. And. so what did her opinion matter? In five years, she wouldn't be around any more anyway. A lost soul in the path of progress who cared more for pretty sunrises than money. A nut.
Max drove across the street and down, parking under the motel canopy, out of the hot sun. "Well?" he asked, turning towards her. "One negative out of how many? And a screwball at that?"
"Yes," Vera said, hiding the fact that she thought more of that one nut's opinion than all the money-hungry others.
"I've got to go in a minute. This took longer than I thought it would, and I've got to tell a guy I'm going to be late for a meeting."
"I'm going in, too," Roger said. "I gotta take a leak. You coming, Mom?"
The sun was hot. She sighed and got out. Max went ahead of them. She took a critical look at the lobby this time. It. was attractive and cool. As a building, it wasn't ugly. But the meaning of it was.
She heard them in the office; She went in. They were in a small room off the office. The door was marked with an Authorized Only sign.
Max sat at a console, instructing Roger on something. There was a small TV screen centered at it. There were stacks of videotape canisters in ordered array on shelves and a large bank of numbered lever switches.
"This is what Dancer rigged up," Max said, turning to her, smiling. "When someone registers with the movie option, and pays, of course, we flip the lever for his room, and his TV is cut into the circuit."
"That's not all, Mom," Roger said excitedly. "Check this."
Max started to stop him when he reached for a lever. Then he didn't. Vera felt a sickening premonition. Roger flipped the lever, and the small screen bloomed to life. She stared at it and sucked in her breath and felt her emotions spin.
It was the interior of one of the rooms upstairs. The waterbed was there, the big chairs, the night tables with the control panel. But she wasn't looking at the peripheral images. Her eyes were fixed on the bed, on the unmistakable image of Thorne Bundt-her Thorne. He was lying on his back. He was naked. His head lolled back and forth, and moans came from a speaker below the small monitor.
He wasn't alone. Joyce and Rainey were on the bed with him, and they were doing everything to him Joyce's inventive, cunning mind could dream up.
Her bald pussy gleamed in the screen. She rubbed it while she fucked up and down along Thorne's sturdy, stiff cock, the same one that had been so wonderfully imbedded in her cunt last night, the one that had given her back a sense of meaning to life.
While she watched, Rainey positioned herself so tat she could lick and suck at Joyce's cunt and the sliding prick. Her smooth, tight ass rounded over Thorne's face, blocking it out. She lowered her hips, spreading her dark-flirted cunt over his mouth. In a moment, she moaned with bliss and made small circles with her ass, and there was no doubt that he was drilling into her pussy, sucking her bloated, wet cuntlips for her.
Vera stared. An icy hollowness yawned in the pit of her stomach. "No!" she cried wildly. "It's a trick! I don't believe it!" She looked for a sign of his being forced. She didn't see any. Max flipped the lever off, and the screen went dark. He stood up and took her arm.
"Let's go upstairs and see if it's a trick, Vera, he said, grinning in a way that was suddenly not at all paternal.
There was no resistance left in her. She stumbled on stiffened legs beside him as he guided her up the stairs and down the balcony. He talked on the way.
"I don't think you realize what you just saw in there, Vera. I don't mean Bundt. I mean the potential.. Not only can we show movies to the warns, but we can look in on the rooms over the monitor."
"And it makes movies on the videotape," Roger added, cackling over the genius of it all. "Not for blackmail exactly, Mom. Let's just say, for a little extra money, depending on the guest."
She looked at her son. No. She looked at someone who had the same general appearance as her son. He was really a stranger.
"Maybe not money, Roger," Max said. "Take Bundt, now. What do you suppose he'd pay to get hold of that tape? Co-operation? Stock votes in our favor?" He laughed with a victorious sound.
They marched with funeral solemnity. It was fitting. Something had died-several things. Her trust in Thorne. Offering to marry her and then climbing onto the waterbed with both of them. Her hope to win out against the evil surrounding Max Sawyer had died, too. The life's work of a good man. It had all died with that one brief scene.
They stopped in front of a room. She turned her head towards the clean ocean. The building cast a long shadow towards ii as the sun sank lower into the Gulf on the other side. Max forced her head around with his hand. She heard moans and sighs coming from the room. The image blurred in her mind before she could squeeze her eyes shut and stop looking at it. They were still flicking. And Thorne was straining his hips upward as he came into Joyce's sucking, gleaming cunt.
Somewhere in the corner of her vision was Dancer, lurking evilly, thin-lipped and watchful, his eyes slitted with the pleasure of Thorne's degradation.
Vera choked out a harsh sound. Max let her go. Roger took hold of her and led her into the next room, closing the door. He half pushed her onto the waterbed, then began unbuckling his pants. She stared at him, not even caring when his prick sprang up towards her, stiff and ready.
"Watching them made me horny, Mom," he said, coming onto the bed.
"Get away from me, Roger," she said. Her voice was hollow. There was no force in it. He grinned and reached behind her and unzipped her white mini.
Yes, take it off Remove the virginal white. It's a sham. The whole rotten world is a sham. Take the money and run. If you don 't, some other slippery bastard wilt Friend, husband, lover, son-some bastard will, and you 'II get fucked anyway.
Roger slipped her dress from her body. He laid her back and rolled her from buttcheek to buttcheek as he slid her panties over them and off her hips.
His prick bumped against her outer thigh. He was breathing heavily, the sound frill of lust. She hadn't remembered his breathing that way before. That made sense. He wasn't the same any more. Max had changed him. Now he was going to change hen
"God, you've got nice fits, Mom," he said. He took one into his mouth and sucked it.
"I'm your pretty lady," she said hollowly.
"Roger, don't."
"You didn't say that the last time we were up here. You said, Roger, fuck me. Hey, what's the matter?"
"Roger, you're a selfish, stupid bastard."
His face pinched together slightly. "Don't call me a bastard, Mom. You sounded like him just now." "I'm beginning to think like him. About you." "Cut it out, Mom." "Go to hell, you bastard."
"I said cut it out! Goddamn it, I don't have to tae that kind of shit from anybody any more, not even you! I've got it made now! I'm gonna be Vice President, Max said so. It's all in the bag, Mom. And he's giving me Rainey, too, slicing her away from Dancer just as soon as it's all over next week. Damn it, Mom, be happy!" he cried, shaking her by the shoulders, making her tits jiggle on her chest.