Finally, the covers kicked back, the chill sweeping over them unnoticed. Slim hips rotating their invitation, young hands urging him to hurry, voice chanting --
“Now! Now! Oh, do it to me now! You do it! You! You! You! Nobody else, ever! Only you! You!”
And all the time those deep, green eyes staring up at him with lust and worship.
His prick! It was hard and long and throbbing! Her hand was on it now, fondling his nuts, tickling the tip, finding it damp and rubbing the leakage into the crown. “Put it in me!” A whisper. Then the hot thighs parting and the hand guiding his stiff cock to the lips of her young, soft pussy. In. . .In. . .In. . And. ..
Together then, and a sharp cry of pain. The anguished cry of his virgin bride? The cry of their wedding night so many years ago? An echo soon gone, lost in the frenzied rhythm of two bodies moving as one.
A roaring then, and a blackness and an explosion from deep inside his body. Then hers, followed by another cry, one of triumph, of thanks and adoration. And more words, hazily heard, not quite understood, dream words, hazily heard, not quite understood, dream words lost in the subsiding of rapture.
“I love you! Oh, I’ll never love anybody else the way I love you. Thank you, daddy. I love you, daddy!”
Jarring, yes, but lost in the still-drunken stupor which envelops him. Blackness and dreamless sleep. But broken once more during the night in a second phantasmagoria of lovemaking. Again the “I love you, daddy!” is lost in the oblivion of sleep.
Gray morning. The sleet has stopped. The wind has died down. Only the slate-cloud sky testifies to the grudge left behind by the angry night.
Dull headache opens Ben’s eyes. He remembers. He had a dream. A dream of sex. But so real! Things come into focus and for a moment he knows dread.
He sits up. Thank God! The bed beside him is empty. Then it was only a dream.
He gets up. He shakes his head, smiling to himself ruefully at the hangover he has. But he can’t pamper himself. The hogs are waiting to be fed. No rest for the liquor-logged. He goes into the bathroom and sticks his head under the cold water tap. Refreshed, he returns to his bedroom. He begins to make up his bed. He stops, as the evidence of truth crashes through his morning torpor.
There, on the bedsheet! Unmistakable! Bloodstains!
He stares for a long moment, then turns and walks slowly to Wilma’s room. She’s sleeping very soundly. Gently, he pulls the covers aside. There are bloodstains on her nightgown. The proof of their lovemaking still clings to her loins.
Ben returns to his room. He sits heavily in a chair and stares out the window for a very long time. Finally he hears Wilma beginning to stir. A while later he hears her moving around the kitchen. He rises and goes downstairs.
“Pack your things,” he tells her. “You’re gonna visit your Aunt Mattie in New Orleans.”
“What? Why?” The ecstatic look with which she has greeted him vanishes from her face.
“Cause it’s best. That’s why.”
“Daddy, are you punishing me?”
“No. I’m not punishin’ you. I’m the one should be punished, not you. I’m the one has to carry this sin. You’re not to blame, Wilma. You’re only a child. But I’m a man an’ I’ve committed the worst sin of all. You gotta go away. It’s the only way.”
“But I don’t want to,” Wilma protested. “I don’t want to leave you. I want to stay with you always.”
“You’re goin’! An’ that’s final!”
And so it was. Wilma left for New Orleans on the afternoon train. With her she took another bit of knowledge:
Sex is not only a weapon to be used. Sex is also a trap which can destroy that held most dear. Beware of it!
CHAPTER THREE
“Sex is a trap. Beware of it!”
Twice in her life, Glory Dawe’s mother took enough notice of Glory to bother giving her advice. Both times the advice was exactly the same. The two occasions were within a few weeks of each other.
The first time was about three months after Glory’s twelfth birthday. It was the night she glanced down while undressing and saw the blood trickling down her leg. Panic-stricken at the source, she ran into her mother’s bedroom.
Her mother was just getting ready to go out. When Glory came hurtling into her arms and sobbed out what was troubling her, the first thing Florence Dawes did was to push the child away and turn to the mirror to be sure Glory hadn’t soiled her dress. Then, glancing at her watch, she seated Glory firmly on the edge of the bed and took a chair herself, safely across the room from her. Tersely, clinically, she explained to her daughter what was happening to her. She ticked off the points one by one on her fingertips. Lacquered nails sparkling, she told Glory how natural it was, how now she was a woman, how now she was even capable of having babies. She finished up with an explanation of how cricumspect she expected Glory to be now, concluding that “sex is a trap; beware of it!”-- a statement she repeated three times to be sure that it registered.
Florence Dawe’s timing was perfect. With the third repetition a maid entered the room to announce, “Mr. Von Stummer is waiting for Madame in the drawing room.” Herr Von Stummer was one of the many aristocratic men who squired Florence Dawes around the night spots of Cannes. She’d made her home on the Cote d’Azur of the Riviera for five years now -- ever since her divorce from Preston B. Dawes, Glory’s father. During that time, the generous alimony settlement Preston had granted her allowed her to enjoy the Riviera society life to the hilt. And, since she was an extremely beautiful woman, she suffered no lack of men to cater to her desires.
Now she patted Glory on the head, tossed the sable stole about her shoulders and left for her date. Glory, used to adapting to her Mother’s busy timetable, accepted her departure philosophically. There were questions she would have liked to have asked, but she knew her mother would never forego one of her appointments to answer them. So Glory went back to bed and tried to figure out the answers for herself. Momentarily, it occurred to her to put the questions to one of the maids in the household, but she immediately scotched the idea, aware that well brought up young ladies didn’t discuss matters of hygiene with the domestic help. Nor matters of sex. And, since there were no girls of her own age in the society in which her mother moved, and since she was forbidden to play with the children of the servants, or those who lived in Cannes, Glory was pretty much left to find her own way in matters of sex as well. She was doing that just before the second occasion of her mother’s advising her.
Glory had taken a shower. Back in her bedroom, she had slapped off her robe and lain down naked on the bed, trying to catch the late afternoon breeze coming through the window. Despite the breeze and the shower she’d just had, however, Glory’s body felt very warm. Indeed, there was a strange, burning sensation welling up from beneath her belly.
Glory touched the spot. The touch didn’t cool it, but somehow it made her feel good. She stroked, gently, her nail just grazing the petal of skin at the forbidden doorway. The sensation was exquisite. Slowly, she felt herself beginning to open, almost like a flower. Her hand investigated, probing deeper and deeper. She caught her breath sharply with the instinctive realization that her fingers had found what they were seeking. She moved slowly, bouncing slightly on the bed as her excitement mounted. Then she moved faster and faster in a frenzy of delighted discovery.
Her hands squeezed her already blossoming breasts. That feels good! Très good! She noted with wonder that the berry tips were reddening, growing harder and longer. She angled her head until she’d forced one of them between her lips. She sucked at it greedily as her freed hand returned to that burning area which Glory had once seen described in a forbidden book as “honeybox”. What was done to it, the book had gone on to say, was called “fucking”.