When the ladder began jiggling more often and he had to grab her firm little ass more often lest she fall and bump her bumpers, there was such an open, playful quality to it all that she was never really on her guard like she would have been if some pimply stud of her own age had made a habit of grabbing her ass. Not even when he warned her that, "A firm little body like that could give even the oldest man young ideas."
"Awwwwwwwwwwwww!" she had protested.
"Truly, young lady. All a simple matter of glandular chemistry, you know. More marriages were made in hell than in heaven, as any divorce lawyer knows to his continuing prosperity. And just think of all the heartbreak and suffering that could be avoided if only humans would learn to separate the spiritual from the physical functions."
Paula had sensed that she was exploring the delicious edge of something never before discussed. But she was still unsure just what attitude was proper for a young lady under such circumstances to assume.
"Such a premium our society places on performance-as if we all aspired to some athletic ideal," the old man said wistfully.
Paula could almost understand what he was talking about.
"Trouble with all the Utopian communities," he continued, "is they're like zero population growth: if they work, they destroy themselves. If they don't… " He shrugged. "Tell me, young lady, have you ever heard of the Oneida Community?"
"Some place where they make silverware?" Paula hazarded.
Mr. Costello smiled and patted her shoulder. "They do nowadays. A hundred odd years ago they made social and sexual history."
"Oh?"
"Even over a century ago the world was becoming over populated," the old man explained. "The Oneida Community was founded to solve this problem without removing all joy and the only relatively inexpensive recreation from people's lives."
Paula was foundering again. What on earth was he talking about? He was such a nice old man and it made her go all quivery inside whenever he steadied the ladder and beamed up her skirt. When, as increasingly happened, she almost fell and had to be caught by a surprisingly strong arm around her thighs and bottom there were times when she came so close to melting she could actually feel a tiny trickle.
"How did they do that?" she finally asked.
"Very simply," he explained. "They abolished private property."
Paula couldn't understand.
"In a capitalist society where women have no rights, you too, young lady, would have been regarded as private property."
Paula sensed that there were dimensions of the law and of human behavior still unexplored. "Oh!" she said in an odd little voice. She didn't know whether her surprise came from the new and fascinating intellectual vistas opened up for her by Mr. Costello or if her "Oh!" came from his hand which now rested somewhat above her knee.
CHAPTER 8
With a jerk that shook her body as if she had lept physically across the intervening years, Paula returned to the danger-fraught present. To hell with teen-age fantasies. She had just been raped and she didn't want it to happen again, no matter how her cunt might continue offering unwanted and minority opinions on the subject of fucking.
Nice old Mr. Costello had turned out even nicer than she had ever expected but had she really locked every door and window? Had she possibly forgotten something? Paula was realistic enough to know that what had happened once could happen again.
Harry Riggs had not exactly raped her. It would have been rape if she had resisted. But she hadn't. An unnecessarily delicate point of law, perhaps, but she wasn't discussing law. She was just trying to remove temptation, knowing that if ever that small sinewy body with the tremendous bowsprit were to approach her again, put hands on her shoulders again, sure as delays and injunctions, she would go round heeled one more time.
She made the rounds of the house, fully aware of Freudian slips and of the perfectly obvious things that a mind can do when its owner tries to force mind and body down an equivocal course of action. Somewhere around this house she knew damned well she had left something open. The goddam phone was ringing again. She had left one off the hook so this had to be the other-the emergency phone for her parolees. She guessed she'd better answer it.
"Hello?"
"Ready for another?"
Oh Jesus! It was Harry Riggs. She ought to have known it wasn't just bluff. He had gotten into her once. He had seen through her sham, seen how badly she wanted it, how she had surrendered to eight solid inches and to hell with eight centuries of common law.
"No, Harry," she managed, struggling for calm authority in her voice. "I'm a reasonable person and I know you were carried away and no lasting harm was done but you can hardly expect me to continue this way." Even as she said it Paula knew that was exactly what the ferret-faced little man was expecting. And why shouldn't he? She had given him no reason to expect otherwise. There was no answer. Staring at the silent phone, she felt a rising panic. Just this tenuous connection with that small wiry body, that tremendous phallic bludgeon… she could feel lust rising like a prickly heat from her belly until her tits, her shoulders, her face all blushed furiously. Thank god he wasn't looking at her. "I'll call the police!" she squealed.
There was a chuckle and then she could hear the dial tone. She hung up and once more began her obsessive round of doors and windows, checking locks, checking latches, trying to divine what it was she was forgetting. She knew damned well there was a gaping hole somewhere in her defenses-gaping even wider than her cunt when those tremendous eight inches had been threatening to split her from asshole to belly button.
She twitched a drape and looked out into the street. It was the wrong time of day for traffic. She saw a single male figure walking up the block and guessed it was the mail man, then abruptly she knew with dead, sinking certainty that it was not.
Harry Riggs must have been phoning from right in the neighborhood because here he came bold as Superman stalking right up the street, right to her front door. She remembered that he was a professional breaker and enterer. But surely not in broad daylight-not in sight of every nervous old nellie who kept tabs on strangers in the neighborhood. Then she saw that he wasn't heading for her front door. Instead, he took something from the pocket of his ill-fitting overcoat and a moment later Paula watched her radio-controlled garage door gaping wide open. It closed after him as Harry Riggs, paroled breaker and enterer, budding home wrecker, touched the radio control gadget again.
She remembered how Smart-ass had opened her door with his control. So much for security. So much for Freudian slips. Now what was she going to do?
Suddenly she was thinking again. She raced for the kitchen. If she could just bolt the door before… but Harry was already inside the kitchen, already shedding his topcoat. "Hi sweetheart," he said blithely, and began undressing.
"Harry, you can't do this!" she stormed. "You'll end up back in prison. Even if I wanted to, I don't dare let you do it again. What do you suppose would happen to my career if the board ever found out I was mixing business and pleasure?" Even as she said it Paula knew she didn't want it, hadn't intended for it to come out that way.
But it had. And Harry was paying no attention. Still undressing, standing one-legged in front of her with no regard for an assault he knew would not come, he danced about getting a leg out of his pants.