Vince thought she was beautiful. The purple eye-shadow was beautiful, too, and the pale lipstick. But most of all, the girl underneath all the garbage was beautiful.
And obviously a virgin.
She was the only one he wanted. There were other girls at the lake, but next to Rhonda they seemed pretty pallid and dull. They could have been easy, some of them. A few gave him come-on glances that meant he could have them flat on their pretty backsides just by saying the word. But he didn’t feel like saying the word, not to them.
But Rhonda, damn her to hell, didn’t want to hear the word.
All she wanted to do was talk, and walk around in the woods, and go out rowing on the lake, and look at the stars, and think very deep thoughts. This fooled him at first. He dated her about five minutes after he first set eyes on her, and when he asked her what she wanted to do that night she told him she wanted to go rowing on the lake.
Which pleased Vince no end.
Because, as everybody knew, a girl who wants to go rowing on the lake is a girl who wants to do other things. And if the girl herself suggests the rowing expedition it is an odds-on bet that the rowboat is going to get one hell of a workout.
That wasn’t exactly the way it turned out. When Rhonda said she wanted to go rowing on the lake, that was precisely what she meant. She wanted to sit in her end of the boat and look up at the stars and think profound thoughts. That was all she wanted to do.
Fortunately, he figured this out before he made the mistake of making a pass. Otherwise everything would have been shot to hell right at the start. But he played things very cool, very cool indeed, staying on his side of the boat and helping her stare at the stars. In between staring at the stars and leaning on the oars he did some supplementary staring at Rhonda’s breasts. The blouse she wore was trying to hide the fact that she had any breasts, but Vince had a good eye for that sort of thing. He could tell that she was built very well, soft and firm and very nice to look at, and undoubtedly still nicer to hold onto.
She was, he decided, worth waiting for. So what if she wasn’t going to fall into his arms on the first date? Maybe things worked differently in New York.
And, following this line of reasoning, he didn’t try to kiss her goodnight. He just stopped her at the door to her cabin, took her chin in his hand, and looked deeply into her eyes. Her eyes were brown and very soft.
“Tomorrow night,” he said. She hesitated, then nodded, and he turned on his heel and walked off into the night. He had it made, he knew, because he had suddenly figured out Rhonda’s Dream Man. Her Dream Man was sort of a cross between Tony Perkins and Cary Grant, if such a combination was possible. Shy and deep like Perkins, polished and assured like Grant. All he had to do was play that role properly and the prize was his.
Maybe.
The next night was a disappointment. They took a walk to the woods, another type of scene which with any other girl would have been an obvious prelude to a more advanced form of entertainment. Not with Rhonda, however. They walked through the woods and she rambled on and on about how wonderful nature was while he half-listened and half-contemplated how wonderful nature really was.
When he tried to kiss her goodnight she pulled away from him, her eyes very sad. “Don’t, Vince.” He didn’t say anything.
“I like you, Vince. But it’s so... so physical, kissing and all that. I’d like us just to be friends, to share things with each other.”
He felt like telling her something she had that she really ought to share with him. But that of course would have ruined it for good, so he played his role and hung his head and told her that he was sorry, that of course she was right, and that it was his fault that he had permitted himself to get carried away by animalistic desires.
When he got home he took a cold hip bath, as recommended in that corny Boy Scout Manual. It didn’t help.
And if that was bad, the next few nights were worse. Bit by bit he managed to convince her that an experience couldn’t be meaningful unless bodies as well as souls merged. While he told her this he kept his hands to himself, speaking slowly and soulfully. And she agreed, more or less.
More or less. Oh, she wasn’t one to minimize the importance of physical love. She knew how wonderful a thing physical love could be, when two people shared everything there was to share. There was just one little catch. She herself, she explained sadly, was a cold woman. She couldn’t feel anything that way, couldn’t get excited or interested. It just didn’t do anything for her.
“I’ll help you, Rhonda,” he told her. “Let me kiss you. Let me make you feel our love.”
She was willing to be kissed. So he kissed her, first gently and then not so gently. But kissing her wasn’t nearly as pleasant as it should have been. She didn’t struggle or pull away. She didn’t respond, either. She just stood there like a window dummy and let him do the kissing.
It was about as stimulating as kissing a dead fish.
He kept trying. When the kisses didn’t do anything he tried touching her and, although his hands had been itching to get hold of her body, the act itself didn’t live up to his expectations.
The body did. He didn’t undress her, just ran his hands over her clothing. It was enough to convince him that all that was there belonged to little Rhonda. And little Rhonda was not little at all. She had as nice a body as anyone he had ever came across.
Her breasts were better than Betty’s — a little larger and quite a bit firmer. Her legs were perfect.
But all she did was submit to his touches. She didn’t quiver or breathe hard or clutch at him or anything. She just acquiesced, and her body as a result was not the body of a warm girl but the body of a very well-formed statue. Perfect and flawless, but no more responsive than a slab of marble.
And somehow this took all the fun out of it. At first it was a challenge, trying to find some way to coax a response out of her. Then, as he kept meeting the challenge and failing wretchedly, it began to become a bit of a bore. Especially because of the way she talked.
They would kiss (or rather he would kiss her) and they would pet (or rather he would pet her) and every few minutes she would pull her head to one side and start telling him how miserable she felt over the fact that she didn’t feel a thing. It was bad enough knowing that she didn’t feel a thing without hearing about it all the goddamned time. That made things just so much worse.
It was a week now, a week of frustration that didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere in particular. And the fact that there was so much other stuff available didn’t help matters. He would see girls down by the lake and know damned well that they’d spread their pretty selves for him the minute he said the word.
And here he was with Rhonda.
Who wouldn’t.
He had a date with her in half an hour, but somehow he didn’t even feel like going. To hell with her. Let her sit in her cabin and play with herself or something. There wasn’t any sense wasting his time with her. And it was sure as hell a waste of time. Maybe some of the guys would be all excited at the prospect of playing doctor with a pretty girl, but he’d been around long enough to want more.
To hell with her. He could go out now and find himself something within five minutes, something that would come across on the first date and be all ready and willing any time he wanted. That made one hell of a lot more sense than wasting his time on a hunk of ice from the big bad city of New York.
He hung his head in disgust. The Great White Hunter was out of his class, that was the trouble. He just wasn’t good enough to drag down this particular prey.
And then, suddenly, he stopped hanging his head and began to shake it resolutely. Dammit, he wasn’t giving up! And he wasn’t going to play games any more, either. He was going to win.