“Alone at last.” She shot me an impish grin.
“This is no time for coyness. We may have real trouble.” I wrapped the shroud around me, got up, and went over to the heavy door by which I’d entered. It was locked. I took a look around. There was no other way out of the place. “We do have real trouble.” I amended my guess.
“It’s chilly in here.” April pulled the shroud more closely around her.
“It’s going to get a damn sight colder,” I opined. “This place is refrigerated like one of those packing-house deep-freeze boxes.”
“But why?” She was shivering.
“So the meat doesn’t spoil.” I made a sweeping gesture that took in all the corpses.
“And we’re locked in?”
“Yep.”
“Then we'd better scream for help,” April said practically. “I’d rather be caught here than freeze to death.”
“Good thinking.”
“Shall I scream, then?”
“Be my guest.”
“HEL-LUP!" April projected. “HELLLLP! HELLLP!”
The sound was dead. I tapped one of the walls, then the door. “Save your breath,” I told April. “The place is too well insulated to keep the cold in. It’s soundproof.”
“Then what are we going to do?” Her teeth were chattering now.
“Stay warm as best we can.” I made my way from slab to slab and collected the shrouds. “Lie back down,” I instructed April. When she complied, I spread out six of the shrouds and piled them on top of her. That left me with four. I picked an adjoining slab and spread them over my own body.
A few moments passed before April spoke again. She poked her nose out from under the pile of shrouds. “They look awfully cold," she observed, indicating the ten naked corpses surrounding us. “Look. They’re turning blue. They must be freezing, they look so stiff.” She pulled the shrouds back up over her head again.
“They’re dead,” I reminded her. “Don’t waste your sympathy on them. If it gets much colder, we’re liable to be just as dead.” Even with the four shrouds over me, I could feel the increasing cold in my bones.
The temperature dropped still lower. The deep-freeze machinery continued humming merrily. April felt it, too.
“Aren’t there any more things to use for covers?” she asked pleadingly.
“Here.” I took two of the shrouds off me and spread them over her.
“Oh, no,” she protested. “That's not fair. You’ll freeze. Wait a minute. I have an idea. Why don’t we bundle? You know, like the pioneers used to do during the long, cold winters. Yes, that’s the only way. Pile all of them over here and crawl under them with me.”
I did as she suggested. Her naked body provided the first real warmth I'd felt since the freezing unit had started operating. We wrapped our arms around each other and snuggled close together.
Under the pile of shrouds the way we were, I couldn’t see April. But I could remember what her face and figure were like. The memory, combined with the proximity of our bodies, was warming in itself.
I remembered red-brown hair and a kittenish face with a light spattering of freckles. The face seemed always to have an expression of innocence mixed with erotic invitation. It was April's face, as well as her body, that made her one of the most promising young sex kittens to have appeared on the movie scene lately.
Not that I’d sell her body short, not even in memory. If her face had the appeal of a nymphet, her body attested to the ample development of a few more years. It was small and compact, but it curved in where a good figure is supposed to curve in, and blossomed out where a sex kitten is supposed to burst out.
Her breasts didn't have the size of a Voluptua, but they were more than adequate. Only slightly larger than average, what they might have lacked in girth they more than made up for in firmness and shapeliness. They were perfect cones, naturally angled upward, round and plump at their bases but tapered to a pair of sharp points at the tips. They were milk-white, the tips a dark, almost purplish red.
Hip-wise, her femininity was accentuated by a tiny waist that made her slender hips seem fleshier than they actually were. But the fleshiness of her derriere was no illusion, and the fact of its naturally being-carried high made it all the more sensual. Its sensuality was in contrast to her legs, which were slim, all-American cheerleader limbs, neat and trim, but not particularly stimulating of themselves.
Except—very much except!—for now, when those legs arched to clutch at my body in an effort to find more warmth. I had my arms around April and her back felt cold under the palms of my hands. But with our legs entwined, the lower points of contact we’d established were far from cold. Indeed, as the fulcrums of our bodies pressed together, the flame we kindled there was blazing hot. I let my hands slide down her back. The farther they descended, the warmer it was.
“I don’t care if the lay-in was supposed to be tomorrow,” she murmured. “We have to be flexible, don’t we?”
“It’s the key to survival,” I assured her, feeling the tips of_her breasts pressing into my chest like twin, sharp-pointed branding irons.
She burrowed her face into the cleft between my neck and shoulder, and her lips turned it into another area of warmth. After a moment I returned the favor, sliding down to bury my mouth in the deep valley between her breasts. The maneuver, however, was a little foolish. It forced my feet out from under the bottom of the shroud, and my toes suddenly felt like someone had dropped a cake of ice on them. Hastily I doubled up my legs to pull them back under the shroud again. The reaction temporarily pinned the lower half of April’s body under my weight.
“Ahh, how nice and warm.” Her voice was husky.
“Am I too heavy?”
“If you could just move your knee -“
'I moved it, and she wriggled out from under me a little. I warmed one of my hands at her breasts. She caught her breath sharply and the breast inflated under my caress. Her nails raked the side of my body and then dug into one of my thighs. She tilted her head back so I could kiss her. I obliged. As our tongues met, her whole body tensed and vibrated against me. We rocked back and forth that way a moment, her body like a drawn bowstring.
When the kiss was over, April's hand slid down my belly. Her fingers encircled me and her lips brushed against my ear as she moaned. I slid my hand around hers and stroked the soft triangle beneath her navel. Her thighs slid apart.
“Oh-oh-oh-oh!” She bounced up and down and then moved her hips in small circles to direct the pressure of my fingertips. Her fist was like a vise now. She sank her teeth into my shoulder. She’d forgotten all about the cold.
So had I. Her warm flesh moving against mine caught me up in its impatience. I moved my hand and the petals of her flower of womanhood parted. A few seconds later a laugh of ecstasy trilled from her lips.
We shifted position again, hurriedly. My hands both slid under her now. She clasped hers around my neck, the nails biting into my flesh. Her back arched and her body rose up to meet me as I lunged to fill her hot, honeyed desire. We moved together then, faster and faster, changing the direction of the motion, rotating and spinning and pounding as though this were some carefully choreographed ritual we’d both timed to perfection.
And it was perfection. Her first little scream of satisfaction urged me not to stop. Her legs locked around my waist. The shrouds covering us went flying and we didn’t even notice. We were flying ourselves. Three more screams came from April before we ran the final race which ended with both of us high in the unthinking clouds of our mutual ecstasy. It was long and drawn-out, that final moment; it was an eternity. And even when it was over, exhausted as we both were, she didn't want to release me.