Paula finished drying her hair and hastily began making the rounds of her house, shooting bolts, locking windows and doors. She checked out front to make sure Smart-ass had closed the garage door as he left. Damn I What if Smart-ass ever found out about Harry Riggs raping her? She could endure exposure, had already endured it, she guessed. But how could she ever endure Smart-ass's pity?
She finished securing her little house and went back into her room, ignoring the steadily jangling phone. Then, tiring of the racket, she picked it up, blew another shrill police whistle blast into it, and put the damned thing down without hanging up. Dimly she could hear a tinny voice taking the Lord's name in vain.
What was she going to do?
There was, she realized, only one thing she could do. It had to be business as usual. If she made a big deal of what had happened, so would the rest of the world. If she took it in stride… even the worst of scandals die down and many a whore has managed to die a duchess.
The only really infuriating thing about it was she hadn't really done anything. It wasn't her fault her dress got caught in that goddam escalator. She hadn't even wanted to go through with that silly presentation, with making herself a sex object once again in this chauvinistic world. It wasn't her fault she'd been raped either. So she shouldn't have let Harry Riggs in. Damn it! Her numbers-both of them-were unlisted. None of her clients was supposed to know her home address. Either somebody had done a careful job of pumping illicit sources or that miserable little bastard had followed her home.
The only thing that was really her fault, she guessed, was squealing and moaning and kicking her legs in the air-her only real fault had been enjoying it. So what could she do about that? Nobody had actually seen her enjoy it. It was her word against a convicted felon's. But, she realized, nobody had seen her being raped either. She'd have to come to terms somehow with Harry Riggs. The miserable little son-of-a-bitch would be trying to blackmail her next.
He'd done her dirty once. It was up to her to get him back inside the joint where he couldn't do her again. Harry Riggs was going to break parole and it would be nothing to do with her. All she had to do was make sure she didn't give in again, that she didn't let her mind dwell on that tremendous hunk of thumping masculinity which this slightly built housebreaker carried between his sinewy legs. Housebreaker, hell! Harry Riggs had picked the wrong profession. Advertise those full firm eight inches and he'd be a homewrecker.
But he wasn't going to wreck hers. She made the rounds again, checking every door, every window, making goddam sure that little breaker and enterer would never ever get into her house again, would never poise his slight body over her and insinuate his eight inches into her suddenly fluttery cunt.
Damn it to hell! Just thinking about him and she was all turned-on again. Turned on by a rapist! She must be going out of her mind. Maybe she ought to see a shrink. But wouldn't that be a lovely item for the newsboys to have fun with… lady lawyer stripteases, sees shrink to get it all together again.
She caught herself wondering about Smart-ass. He was a high rolling swinger but he'd never married despite an abundance of willing candidates. What kind of a cock did he have? How was his bedside manner? What would have happened if he had poured his socially acceptable sabre into her instead of leaving and leaving the field clear to some breaker and enterer?
What difference did it make? She was damaged goods now, saleable only at reduced prices. What in hell was she thinking? She didn't want a husband, didn't want to be taken care of. She was an emancipated, independent woman, for Christ's sake! She had to stop this crazy thinking, get her head back together. Get her legs back together.
But even as she was making all these valiant resolutions Paula could feel the memory of that cock coursing in and out of her. My god! It was like getting hooked on horse! It was like turning vampire. How could she have known the depth and breadth of her appetites? Daydreams, nightmares were one thing. But to open her legs to a cruddy little breaker and enterer…
He wasn't tall, wasn't handsome, wasn't young, wasn't any of the things that were supposed to turn people on. Paula had dealt with him off and on for nearly her whole twelve years in this dead-end job. She had never given him more than a passing thought. Never ever had she for one moment wondered what it would, be like to be fucked by Harry Riggs, breaker and enterer. Until she had seen his tiny, almost jockey-sized body naked, had seen the sheer raw size and power of his prodigious, out-of-proportion cock. God, what a hammer!
She remembered how she had lain helpless with her ass wrapped lovingly around that phenomenal phallus, totally enslaved by the slow sensuality of his metronomic in and out, all thoughts of emancipation and the liberation temporarily tabled until closure of the present session of sensuality. It was just like that first time…
Paula had been a late starter. Looking at her now, surveying that full-cut, totally voluptuous body, it was difficult for even Paula to remember that when she had been sixteen she had been of a skinniness no more promising than that of another well-known Italian sex symbol at the same age. Like Sophia, Paula had resembled nothing so much as a soda straw with two marbles taped side by side along its upper length. Apart from a pair of phenomenal tits, she had been, well-scrawny.
Harder still had it been for her to understand that there comes a time in every man's life when the battery will not hold a charge, when heroic measures are necessary, when the only way remaining for a man to manage a jump start is with the aid of just that kind of immature, just-budding body that first excited his own budding sensuality way back when he too had been just growing hair down there, just beginning to wake up with the solution to life's eternal problem in his sticky hand.
Mr. Costello had been such a man. Turning sixty, with a leonine mane of white hair and well-clipped mustache, he had turned every head in the geritol set. Even Paula had found him handsome and had been delighted when her parents had approved her after-school employment in his office. After all, she wanted to be a lawyer and Mr. Costello was a lawyer and Mr. Costello had offered to start her off in the proper direction and…
It was funny how invariably the reference Mr. Costello needed from his wall-full of books always turned out to be on the top shelf and Paula always had to go up the rickety ladder to get it and Mr. Costello, no matter how busy he was, nice Mr. Costello always had time to hold the ladder lest she fall and bump her pretty little bumpers.
Even funnier was the warm wiggly feeling Paula got inside her every time she climbed the ladder and hunted for his book while Mr. Costello beamed up at her and clung tightly to the ladder. "Got to get that thing fixed one of these days," He kept saying but a month after little Paula had started working for him the ladder remained as rickety as ever.
There were times when she wondered momentarily if he were doing the same thing boys at school did. But that couldn't be so. He was a friend of her parents. He was a lawyer, an officer of the court And he was old enough to be her grandfather. When the ladder jiggled and she almost fell and he grabbed her right by her firm little ass, it had to be a coincidence. Just because Paula felt all warm and fluttery inside couldn't mean Mr. Costello was feeling anything apart from properly avuncular thoughts.
Mr. Costello was such an old man. Afternoons when he was not in court, the genial old lawyer used to take a nap in the back room which had a day bed, a small but well-stocked refrigerator, and a lock on the door. Often he would be just getting his head back together about the time Paula would arrive for her evening of reading the law. It was because he was so old, so nice, so safe that Paula loved being near him and even exchanged girlish confidences with him. He was not at all like her harried father who was so beaten down by the struggle to dress a teen-age daughter that he had no time to talk with her.