Penny was sure that she was slightly pregnant! Slightly being about six weeks and two days. This was precisely the length of time which had elapsed since Penny had made the transformation from the most unwilling of virgins to the most unwed of possible mothers-to-be.
Participating actively in the transformation had been one Studs Levine, a young man who had cooked on all four burners until the marital intentions, which had helped propel his iron into the firebox had been doused by Penny’s taking them seriously. He hadn’t hung around long enough after that to be appraised of the signs of impending motherhood. Not that Penny had any valid reason to believe these might have made any difference to his disinclination to trot down the bridal path with her.
No, she couldn’t really put all the blame on Studs for her predicament. If he’d given her reason to think he wanted to wed her, she was honest enough with herself to admit that that hadn’t been the prime motivating factor behind her cooperating in her fall from purity. Her real reason, pure and simple, was a combination of her own dissatisfaction with her virginal state and the erotic fires which had long made her body burn with carnal desire.
Those fires had been hopefully fed with birth-control pills on a regular basis over a long period preceding Penny’s devirginization. But the pills had merely provided fuel for a fire no man reached the point of igniting. Thus the bitterest pill of all was the one Penny neglected to swallow during the day preceding the fateful night on which Studs’ unsheathed matchstick struck the longed-for spark. Now it seemed that that spark had caught all too well, and Penny was reacting to the consequences.
Aside from the practicalities involved, Penny’s reaction consisted of doing a complete about-face in her attitude towards sex. Where she had formerly made a strong effort to get herself seduced, now the idea of impending motherhood made her regard her body as a temple housing the mystery of life, a temple not to be defiled by further sex under any circumstances. Men—the very idea of maleness, which had once filled her mind with eagerly lewd imaginings—now seemed to her an ever-present threat against the new life budding in her womb. Their eyes devouring her body, the gazes which she had once answered with openly willing looks from her own blue eyes, now struck her as an unfeeling assault against the whole institution of motherhood.
Her experience with Balzac Hossenpfeffer epitomized her changed attitude. Once she would have met his overtures more than halfway. Now, although she hadn’t found him personally unattractive, his frank appraisal of her bosom had made her squirm as if he was poaching on the soon-to-be-lactating preserves of the unborn child She was determined to breast-feed. Thus any response she might have made to him was squelched by her awareness of the possibility of impending motherhood.
Although Penny was sure—a woman always knows, doesn’t she?— that possibility was by no means as yet a medical certainty. This fact was behind her trip to the laboratory today to deliver the urine specimen. The doctor there had explained to her how it worked.
“The first shpritz of the morning without you eat anything first-—this is it, yes?” he had started out.
“Yes,” Penny assured him, remembering the discomfort of controlling herself until she’d found that coffee container.
“Good. So, we make from this a solution, a cocktail for the little rabbit, a Bunny Fix the jokers in the lab call it, and this we inject into our long-eared friend. If you are with child, the wee-wee will make the bunny kick the bucket.”
“You mean it will kill him?” Penny asked.
“Exactly. Your tinkle will turn our live bunny bugger into a dead duck.”
“Suppose I’m not pregnant. Then what happens?”
“The rabbit takes the hypo swig in stride, and he gets a reprieve until the next batch of impregnated kidney rinse arrives.”
“It seems so cruel,” Penny sighed.
“It is that we all have to go sometime,” the doctor told her philosophically. “Although, to be honest with you, it isn’t the way I would like to go myself. Delicacy it lacks as a means to one’s end, yes?”
“Yes,” Penny agreed. “How long before you’ll know for sure?” she asked as an afterthought. ‘
“Twenty-four hours. But it could be sooner if, you are up-knocked and the bunny’s demise is rapid. If a ring you’ll give me around six, there may be news. Or maybe not. It all depends. Into the works I’ll put it right away. Just as soon as I transfer from this leaky coffee container into a test-tube.”
“Thanks,” Penny had told him. “And I’m sorry about the coffee container. I honestly tried to find something else, but I just couldn’t. Good-bye, and I’ll call later.” She had left then.
Now, she put all thoughts of the result of the rabbit test out of her mind and turned her attention to the problem of who she would put in charge of Lovelights if pregnancy forced her to take a leave of absence. The problem pressed heavily on her mind because of her conviction that the rabbit’s demise was inevitable and would only confirm that which her feminine intuition had already convinced her was true.
The solution to the problem boiled down to a choice between the three girls who assisted her in putting out Lovelights each month. On the basis of seniority, the logical choice was Sappho Kuntzentookis, the Greek girl who had been with Pussycat Publications even longer than Penny herself had—five years to be exact, or two years more than her shapely blonde boss. But Sappho presented a twofold problem which made Penny hesitate to transfer responsibility to her.
Sappho’s tenure was the first part of the problem. It had always caused friction between her and Penny. She had resented it when Penny had been promoted over her to a position she felt should rightfully have been hers. Sappho was ambitious. Very ambitious. And she was efficient, too. Penny had to face the possibility that she might do the job so well that the front office might not want to let Penny step back in as Sappho’s boss after the leave of absence.
The other part of the problem was the very reason that Penny had been promoted over Sappho in the first place. It was the fact that everyone in the office from the publisher to the mail boy knew that she was an uncontrollable nymphomaniac. Contrarily, this made Penny fear that Sappho might be erotically detoured from the job—as she had been from a few other tasks in the past-—and that the magazine might suffer as a consequence. The nightmare Penny envisioned was a picture of the magazine not being put to bed on schedule while Sappho put her latest conquest to bed instead.
The nightmare gained substance as Penny gazed through the glass partition of her office at Sappho seated at her desk. The tall Greek girl had arranged the display of her charms as artfully as the window of a chic French pastry shop. As she leaned back in her swivel chair, the frosting of long, lustrous, blue-black hair cascaded into tendrils encircling the maraschino tips of a yeast-cake bosom fully risen under the over-tight glace of the pink sweater she wore. She had contrived to rest her weight on one hip, and the other hip, plus half of the adjacent buttock, jutted roundly from her tiny waist, a baba rump that was both sweet and intoxicating. The high-heeled shoes tipping her long, slender legs tapped atop the desk itself, and the way her short skirt fell away from the legs presented an easy underview of silk-sugared tart-thighs, the raw dough of the flesh above, and a tantalizing taste of the custard eclair shimmering ever so faintly beneath a coating of bikini-panty. All in all, it was an attention-getting arrangement of goodies which was getting the attention it deserved from every male within eye-range.
What worried Penny was the knowledge that if one of these males dropped a hat, Sappho would be off to the stockroom for a quickie with never a thought for Lovelights. It wasn’t that she didn’t do her work conscientiously. She did. But sex always came first—and last and always as well—and that might prove horrendous if she carried the ultimate responsibility for putting the magazine out.