He looked up at the sky. Judging from the sun, it must be about mid-afternoon. The beach was still crowded, but it had quieted down some. It was obvious that everyone, even the little kids, were feeling lazy under the enervating effects of the hot summer sun. Hank scrambled to his feet. No one had seemed to notice anything amiss, so he just dragged the air mattress to shore, tucked it under his arm, and looked about to see if he could spot the striped towel that marked his section of sand.
Orienting himself, Hank realized what he had drifted downward from his "territory," so he set his course in the wet, heavy sand and trudged back up beach.
At that point he was too exhausted to even visually pussy hunt. The water orgy with his dream girl, Julia, had been as exhausting and draining as if he had had a real one. He could feel his prick hanging small and loose in his swim trunks. His collapsed balls ached. He looked down and wondered if he had had a wet dream. He wondered if he had really fired his gun, got off a load. From the way he felt — that empty gut feeling — Hank was pretty sure he had.
Well, he told himself, it couldn't have happened to a better gal or a more deserving guy. After all, a guy could probably go through a fuck like that only once per lifetime. And I'll bet there are hundreds of poor suckers who never have one like that… real or imagined!
With that thought to warm him and sooth his mending ego, Hank found his way back to his towel, still intact together with his other belongings.
It was a beautiful afternoon. The sun was hot, but not too hot. The sky was an incredible robin's-egg blue with cotton-puff clouds hanging here and there like erratic punctuation. The sand was scalding hot, but Hank's "private turf" was shaded by an enormous umbrella stuck kiddy-wonkus in the sand. His towel was cool. The massive umbrella had saved it from the ravages of the early afternoon sun.
As Hank looked around he noted that many of the sun worshipers, who filled the beach, were sound asleep. In fact, the beach was relatively quiet. Only here and there a scream of shrill laughter, a blast from a portable radio, or the stray cry of a child could be heard.
Hank fumbled for his cigarettes, shook one out of the crumpled pack, sought a match, found it, and lit up. He dragged in deeply on the filter tip, savoring the feel of the buzz saw smoke as it cut through his lungs. He coughed and hacked a bit, then leaned back and enjoyed the rest of the smoke in peace.
Contemplating the water in front of him, Hank also took stock of the day's events. He also catalogued the events which had brought him to this moment in time. Alone, hung up, unhappy, etc. You name it. He had it.
"A winner turned loser," that's how Hank had characterized himself last week. And now I'm here to turn the tables, he told himself. Next week I'm going to call myself the loser turned winner.
Hank was used to being a winner. He'd been a winner all the way through school, both in the classroom and on the football field. He prided himself on being a winner.
And he was a winner with the girls. There wasn't a girl he didn't want that he couldn't get. He proved that to himself, and to his boyfriends time and time again. They used to say, "What Hank wants, Hank get!" That carried through after graduation from college, too. He got the wife he wanted. He got the job he wanted with a big firm, an industrial supply firm, one of the biggest.
He started out as a junior executive, and worked his way up… fast. At first they gave him the easy accounts.
They were a pushover for Hank. Before long came the promotions, and the tougher customers. He handled them also. Before long, Hank had his beautiful home in the exclusive part of the suburbs. Two cars, two children. Membership to the best clubs in town. And everyone liked him.
He was a winner. He looked like a winner.
He talked like a winner. He walked like a winner. And everyone likes a winner. People hang around, brushing up against you, always trying to move closer and closer in from the fringe circle to the center, as if by some miracle his winning would rub off onto them, making them winners, too.
Even the fringe group was happy. Happy to be a part of the outer circle where somehow they might benefit from the magic fall-out of his success.
His wife, Cathy, had been happy in those early days of success, also. She basked in the reflected glory of his conquests in business. She loved it when people smiled admiringly and called them the perfect couple.
It wasn't difficult having his children. They were beautiful kids. Hank provided Cathy with all of the domestic help she needed to make her days go smoothly with a minimum of strain. She had her own bank account, and Hank never asked for an accounting of the money he deposited in it every month.
They lived as though it would last forever.
But Hank, even though he didn't show it at first, was under pressure 24 hours a day. They created a legend about him… and he soon found himself struggling to live up to it.
It was a lot of pressure, causing him to develop new needs, emotional ones. Needless to say, drinking went with the territory.
At what point in time do you know you are drinking too much? Is it when your wife starts telling you about it? Is it when you wake up one morning not being able to remember what had happened after midnight or so? Or is it when everyone starts slapping you on the back and congratulating you for being a guy who can really hold his liquor. Or maybe its when people start admiring you for the fact that they can never tell when you've been drinking: "God, Hank, you really don't show it!"
Well, the truth is, you know you've been drinking too hard, too steadily, when you've rumbled around three nights in a row, trying to get a limp mushy cock into your wife's cunt, your mind hot and hungering for sex, your dick cold, begging to be left alone.
That's when panic sets in. The week it happened, Hank couldn't believe it. His wife, Cathy, was pregnant with their second child. Shortly after the embarrassing episode, which she played down, blaming it on overwork, the doctor told Cathy no more sex.
Hank had it worked out in his own mind that it was Cathy's bloated condition. It just didn't turn him on. That's what the trouble was. But his mind was assailed by a thousand and one doubts.
He had to find out. He just couldn't leave it like that. Three failures in a row and no chance to do anything, or try anything again for five months! Five months! The thought brought a chill to Hank's brain that worked its way up his spine from his toes.
He knew there was no way he could wait five minutes to discover whether or not he was still in possession of his manhood. Besides it was all Cathy's fault in the first place, wasn't it? He was totally vague on exactly how or why it was her fault, but that didn't matter. Thinking it was her fault laid the groundwork for the later rationalizations that would permit him to explore, without conscience, the effects of strange pussy on his manhood.
His first adventure had been one evening in the office with Laurie, the babe with the big bosoms who had been giving him the come-on ever since she had come to work there. His cock had risen to the occasion and he had banged her good. She had loved it.
But that wasn't good enough. He had not made any real conquest. You don't really prove anything, he told himself, when you ball someone who has the hots for you and makes no bones about it.
No, if he wanted to prove he still had it, he had to ball a girl who had not demonstrated any really big interest in him. Someone young and fresh. Yes, that was it. Let's see if he could perform with some little thing who had never given him the eye, with someone who hardly knew he existed… Sure, that was it! And he knew just the girl.