“But what?”
“At four o’clock in the afternoon? Without a drink? Or dinner? Or anything?”
“Or anything?” Penny thought that over. “You mean like foreplay?” she said finally with the air of one who has just noticed an electric light bulb going on over her head.
“I’m not sure that I’d put it that way-”
“Oh, I know what you mean. And you’re right, of course. How thoughtless of me! All right, foreplay it is. Kiss the hollow of my neck.”
“Huh?”
“It’s an erogenous zone. Kiss it. Or breathe on it hotly, if you’d rather.”
“But I can’t just—”
“Maybe you’d rather stroke my breasts until the nipples stand out hard and erect against the thin silk of my blouse,” Penny suggested.
“I don’t think—”
“Or perhaps you might caress my legs above my stocking-tops until the flesh grows hot with desire and my thighs fall apart.”
“I think I’m going to fall apart,” Studs muttered.
“Beg pardon?”
“Let’s go for a swim,” Studs said desperately. “Maybe that way we can sort of ease into the – umm — foreplay.”
“You mean frolic in the water like playful, uninhibited animals? Will you kiss me underwater and push down my bikini so that my pear-shaped breasts bobble free?”
“I’m not a very good swimmer,” Studs confessed. “But if you promise to stay in shallow water, I’ll do my best.”
Penny went into the bedroom and changed into her bikini in a trice. Studs was waiting for her with his bathing trunks on, and he guided her out of the cottage, under the boardwalk and onto the beach. Here she broke loose and scampered into the surf. He followed more sedately. ’
It hadn’t been a very good beach day to begin with, and now the overcast sky of late afternoon had driven what sun-seekers had come out back to their pinochle games and mah-jong tiles. The dunes were deserted. They had the ocean virtually to themselves.
Penny dived into the first wave. Behind her, Studs edged into the water more gingerly. He went thigh-high and then stretched on the tips of his toes as the icy waves lapped intimately at his groin. Penny splashed him, and he gritted his teeth and plunged into the next breaker.
She swam out to the rope connecting the series of buoys and motioned for him to join her. He did, and then they were side by side, treading water and holding onto the rope with one hand. With her free hand, Penny leaned all her weight on Studs’ shoulder and pushed him beneath the surface. She sank down. with him, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
It was a long kiss, and Studs came up sputtering and gasping for air.
“Why didn’t you open your mouth so your tongue could dart like a flame when I kissed you?” Penny demanded reproachfully.
“Because,” he explained, “I was afraid I’d drown if I did.”
“Oh.” Penny took his free hand and pressed it against the expanse of bare bosom overflowing the top of her bikini. “How my flesh tingles for you! How quickly you make me breathe. How yearningly hot my flesh is! Doesn’t it feel that way?”
“It feels like a cold, wet fish gasping out of the water,” Studs muttered, retrieving his hand.
“What?"
“Nothing.” He shivered. “Let’s go in before we turn blue,” he suggested.
“Oh, all right.” Penny was disappointed.
However, her hopes revived when they were once again alone together in the bungalow. “Let me dry you,” she suggested, looping a turkish towel over his shoulders and pressing her scantily clad body against his scantily clad body. Studs downed a hooker of whiskey, felt the warmth spread through his scantily clad body — which began pressing back against her scantily clad body — and decided to relax and enjoy it.
“Ohh, you smell so masculine—like the sea,” Penny sighed.
“Like the Fulton Fish Market, you mean,” Studs observed, sniffing at his armpits. “My deodorant must have let me down.” He went into the bathroom and returned spritzing himself with an atomizer.
“But I liked the way you smelled,” Penny protested. “Oh, well.” She shrugged and got back on her ovarian track. “Why don’t you dry me off now?” she asked coyly.
Studs took the towel and made a few passes at her back. Their scantily clad bodies went back into action. Soon Studs had forgotten his pique at her upsetting of his seduction formula and was reacting in keeping with his name.
Yes, he went along for the “L” of it. Lush breasts hot against his chest, longing sighs tickling his ear, lascivious thighs entwining with his, little whimpers, lustful groans —lovely, lovely, lovely was the love-hungry lass. Liberties he took with her, laving her lips with lecherous tongue, locking loins licentiously, lingering over large roseates still lavender from the cold sea. Lively he became, licking the long, semi-lactating nipples, fingers leching over her firm lower quarters, leaning his lump of lust into her liquefying lily-valley. Lastly, he lowered her to the chaise longue, his lust loosed and lenghty now, lightning rod lifted loftily, limbs taut with libilo, love-aimed at her now binkini-less body. Thus, lustily, lustfully, lovingy, lewdly, lifting and lowering, they sank into the depths of “L”.
But not quite.
Studs was a creature of sexual habit. Although Penny was juicily ready, rote called for Studs to bestow one final caress to insure maximum excitation. Thus he stroked the curl-covered hillock of Venus, played flip-flop with the burning, quivering, slippery sentinel at the arch-lipped gates of her womanhood, and finally dipped a pair of well-manicured fingers into the funnel of her pulsating honeypot.
One knuckle deep, and he stopped. He paused. He withdrew. “No!” he said.
“No?” Penny whimpered. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just can’t do it. I just can’t make love to you.” He rose and stood beside her, looking down, firm, proud, naked.
“But why not?” Penny asked. Why not? Her undulating hips echoed the question? Why not? Her outstretched, clutching hand repeated it in Braille. Why not? Her tight-clenched honeypot emitted a little suction sound of frustration.
“Because -” he explained, drawing himself up to his full height and speaking with a voice filled with dignity and a sense of honor befitting a man who has unexpectedly reached the point at which he will not compromise and found the strength to stick by his guns regardless of the strongest temptation, “—because you are a virgin!!!
CHAPTER TWO
THERE IT was! Out in the open. Penny felt as if he’d slapped her across the face. She blushed with the shame of having her secret so brutally revealed.
She was a virgin!
Unloved!
Unwanted!
Unplucked!
Her rosebuds were ungathered. No man, seemingly, was interested in helping her gather them. And now, just when she was so close — so close—another rejection!
Her hips stopped undulating. Her hand unclutched. Her honeypot gave one last sputter and grew cool. Tears welled up in her eyes as she looked at Studs.
There he stood, no longer full of “L”, no longer leonine, lusty and lustful. The proof was visible, the log a log no longer, hanging loosely, languidly, logy and lacklustre now, limp as licorice. And the sight of it filled Penny with the knowledge of another kind of “L”.
Penny managed finally to speak. “Everybody has to start some place,” she said in a small, woebegone voice.
“Not with me.” Studs was firm.
“But won’t anybody have patience with a beginner?” she whimpered.
“You don’t understand.”
“Yes I do. You don’t want me. I understand that.”
“That’s not it.” Studs knew that Penny was waiting for him to go on, but he just didn’t know how to begin. It was all so complicated and it had started such a long time ago. The summer he was thirteen; yes, a long time ago . . .