Penthouse (4 page)

His bonny blue eyes were pleading. She had him, because he needed her back, and bad.

“I’m married,” Crystal protested shrilly.

“Nice! That’s okay by me. Married chicks excite me.” Looking around to be sure they were still alone, he gave Crystal a downstroke
graze to her voluptuous breasts and trim little belly to bring his remark home.

In a flash she was careful Crystal no more. In the curious drugged state of her altered body chemistry, Crystal found Corporal
Cowboy as handsome as a movie star. Every nerve, every pore, was rapacious for intercourse. Her breasts swelled as she arched
her shivering back and tipped her breasts up in mute reply.

The man, Jason O’Neill, the owner of a small appliance repair outfit in Queens, favored your basic Army-Navy surplus store
or cowboy look. In his business he could dress as he liked, and frankly, he liked to strut. Jason lifted Crystal’s hand by
the wrist and jerked it toward the bulge in his crotch. Crystal sneaked a glance at his hard-on and jumped back.

“You are crazy,” she retorted with a catch in her voice.

“This is crazy, but you want it. My name is Jason. Where do we go from here?”

Jason made a mock curly-headed bow that said he was waiting for Crystal to make the next move—to tell him her name, for instance.
But as the heat rose up in her again, all she emitted was a moan. “Oh-oh.” A vestige of her willpower objected, and she swallowed
what might have been a sob. Then she let go, swirling into the eddy of want. Anything to release this fire.

They walked Indian-style to Crystal and Fen’s apartment and walked the three flights to the door, but sense drew Crystal abruptly
back. The stranger must not come inside.

Crystal’s comely face tightened with sudden wariness,
and Jason looked at her in the inadequate light from the old tulip fixture. A delectable chick. This could be a morning to
remember. Jason was not going to let the woman play him for the fool now.

“I feel like you do, sis. No use your husband finding us in bed. I can make you feel real good right here.” He stuck a finger
up her, stretching the drum of her panties—no more. The chick’s eyes, he thought, were wild as pinwheels. He had to know she
and he had the same outcome on their minds.

Crystal goosed herself against the hip pocket of his jeans. Green light.

So when Corporal Cowboy flicked his eyebrows, he did this in question not at Crystal, but toward the two other doors on the
landing. “They’re not home,” Crystal reassured him. “I mean, an invalid lives there, and the other couple work. Nobody comes
in and out in the daytime but me.”

By common consent he was going to roger her in front of her apartment. No telltale traces for Fen to discover. And fi-fo-fum,
if by any unlikely mischance Fen were to enter the building, Crystal would hear him. The Corporal Cowboy would be on the lam
before Fen climbed the first landing. Crystal bit her lip with impatience. That any intruder might cause this stranger to
leave her before he plowed into her with that bursting cock seemed too cruel.

Jason was serious.
So,
thought Crystal,
am I. This fuck will keep me sane. It is a physical craving like an addict’s for a fix. I am lucky the guy seems respectable.

“You go ahead and tell me how you want it,” Jason slurred, searching her eyes, close at hand but not making contact.

“I want it—” Crystal said in a strangulated voice. To which Jason closed her mouth in a bruising kiss.

“You got it.”

Crystal watched Jason pull down her underpants and push them, balled up, into her handbag. She twisted her peasant wraparound
skirt up behind her back and remained standing. A warm trickle flowed in anticipation, and she closed her legs in shame. But
he spread her legs firmly with a nudge of his knee, and with a hand puckered the swollen flaps of her sex to bring on more.
“You want a condom?”

Crystal nodded shyly.

Jason grinned. “We’ll use mine. I have ’em made to order. Your brand might not be big enough for me.”

Crystal waited with her eyelashes fluttering down. Her legs did a little scissor dance on the hinge of her twat.

Jason teased two fingers up inside her pubic area. He was looking into space. He believed she would go all the way now. Soon
he could relax his act, and the fraud, really, that he saw her as a person.

Crystal braced herself against the wall and squatted slightly. Maybe the stranger’s fingers were all he had the guts to use.
They were up to his knuckles in her, and, damp as she was, she suctioned onto him. Meanwhile, she didn’t want to look into
his eyes. Blue, made loony by desire, their rapidness reflected her own. She wanted to unzip his pants and pull him popping
inside her.
Cut the he-man buildup,
her glance told him.
Or I’ll explode.

The fingers came out. As if by reflex, they crooked into a departing pinch of one naked pink lip.

Jason took Crystal’s hand off his belt (where she had been holding on for dear life) and chuckled. “I have to lift out of
these pants real slow,” he demurred.

Crystal saw what he meant as he lowered the zipper over his swollen cock and shimmied his pants down to his hips. Corporal
Cowboy was hairier than Fen, and the thing was wrapped in a wiry blue-black mass—huge. He pressed her palms against the decrepit
plaster of the hall. Holding them there, he moved up into her in a neat arch. He stayed firm as she came again and again,
racked by waves of lust in which every satisfaction seemed to trigger more need. Crystal braced against Jason, putting a distance
between them, and he was fascinated as her body both drew him in and kept him away. He watched her jutting breasts heave from
her rib cage and got more excited. But when he ejaculated, it was almost with an apology for an anticlimax—by comparison with
Crystal’s seismic shudders.

“I see I don’t have to worry about getting you hot,” said Jason with the cheering boasting of a funny line.

Suddenly Crystal shielded her nakedness against his body. She had heard it first, but now he tensed, too. A mouse in the garbage
chute, someone dropping a shoe in the apartment above—something. Fear plunged Crystal into abject sorrow, convinced her she
was on the brink of being found out. It was not that she reproached herself for her act, which felt absolutely necessary.
Rather, to be found out seemed an impossible death. She would melt into a pile of salt. One supercilious look from the bloodshot
eyes of her prized resident doctor spouse and zap, she would be expelled forever from the socially elite milieu. Destroyed
for merely being true to herself.

Detached for a moment by her melancholy, Crystal looked down at herself wonderingly. There was a woman a lot like her, the
wrong half naked, in heat with a worker she had picked up in the subway a half hour before. Was she the same girl who had
thought that making out in the
backseat of a car was dirty and disgusting? And God, it had thrilled her…. Until she got hit with the undertow.

Because next she thought of her future beautiful life as a physician’s wife. Happiness was a gorgeous hydrogen balloon that
Crystal once held within her grasp. Now she saw it fly up and away. Crystal had been a “material girl” before Madonna’s hit
song. Now she would trade every dinette set for the next great fuck. She had become a vixen unrecognizable to herself, changed
on the inside as the outside from, you know, a good gal to a bad one. Fear and grief assailed her. Down she stumped in a kind
of willed faint on her doorstep.

The stranger turned to go but changed his mind. Her helplessness appealed to him. Pearly jism laced in her vaginal hair. It
revved his eager pecker up. Jason’s hand reached out to touch. How warm the babe was. He stroked Crystal’s hair back from
her forehead, noticing that she cleaved to him, not breathing. If she fainted unconscious, he could think of a couple of things
to do with her still.

A noise—
wham!
Jason pulled Crystal to her feet. She responded like a rag doll, but came fully awake. The noise issued from (a safe) three
stories below on the street yet instantly broke the mood. He realized he was hungry. He had to get to work. Sex, food, a job…“You
okay? Your cat’s got restless?”

The rush stopped in Crystal’s ears. She heard the plaintive mew. “Oh, darling Sammy!”
Maybe I’m normal again,
she thought.
Maybe I should stop for a bassinet for the baby.
“Whatever-your-name is, please go.”

Crystal lifted Sammy out—her first baby always—and smothered him with a hug. Sammy nuzzled her back. Crystal tossed back several
red bundles of hair and shuffled in her shoulder bag for the key. Poised to put the key in the
lock, she smoothed her bright, flat hair from the sides of her face and gave a vague smile. “Thanks,” she said, her eyes cast
downward.

Jason’s return smile was forced, uneasy. He saw the woman who still throbbed from him treating him like an intruder.

A woman shouldn’t suck a man’s gold then boot him out like a rat. Ungrateful bitch. But he wouldn’t bruise the peach. She
had been a juicy one. She had a natural clenching grip. And he would remember her, oversized cat and all.… I’ll just put my
pistol back in the holster and clear the hell out.

“Cluck, cluck.” In a corner of his mouth, Jason made a sound like a cowboy to his horse. A grin spread across his thin, attractive
face. It had been great doing it with her. Before he moved into a shadow and hitched up his jeans, he even ruffled Crystal’s
hair—an awkward attempt at friendly closure. With a glance back at her, he was gone. And when she heard him exit through the
front door of the building, Crystal stepped into the apartment with Sammy and reassured herself aloud, “Fen is not here.”
Then, because she did not want Sammy to observe her with his huge, knowing eyes, she closed him out of the bedroom and lay
down. The peace was blessed, but it did not last. Crystal was not much for fantasies, but with her sex still throbbing from
Jason, she was able to reenact what had happened with him. She was rougher with herself than he had been, but no matter how
she felt, she tore and scratched at her secret parts. She had past experience to tell her she would awake, after a dreamless
sleep, pretty and fresh as a conch shell washed by the sand and the sea.

BY
E
VA
M
ORRIS

I
had a meeting on Monday, so I was all suited up in silk and professionalism. Afterward—I can’t quite remember how or why—I
ended up at Denim and Diamonds, a country-western bar right smack in the middle of New York City. Nothing happened until I
left twenty minutes later, my extra-long legs leading me off the curb and into the street. “Ma’am, may I help you hail a cab?”

I turned around, and for the first time all night, my green eyes had something to focus on. Something good? How’s absolute
fucking perfection sound? A blond cowboy who was simply poured into his jeans, with shoulders that were wide and real strong-looking—and
probably very valuable during the spring roundup. Authentic boots, too. “Why, yes, please.” (I spoke with a gentle lilt.)

First rule: I know my prey when I see it, and I begin the seduction immediately. Lost time now is one more afternoon fuck
we could have slipped in later, I always say.

Rule No. 2: I match my vocal delivery to his, then add a distinctly feminine touch. For example, this cowboy
drawls, so I drawl, but not as much—and just a little softer and sweeter. People like to hear themselves. It works every time.

I was standing there thinking,
Here I am with a five-foot-ten stud a mere three feet from me. What should I do?
Then I remembered Rule No. 3 and acted quickly. A man seduced is a man impassioned, and a man impassioned is always a better
fuck. So I acted somewhat unsure, fumbled out an invitation to go cowboy dancing sometime, gave him my number, and quickly
slid into the taxi. (Rule No. 3: When I pick up a man, shyness on my part works wonders.)

“Eighty-ninth, Park and Madison,” I said, once in the cab. Then I slid my skirt up to my waist and pushed my stockings down
so that from the backs of my knees to the top of my ass I was completely naked and sticking to the leather. I was doing something
I love to do. I love to subject myself to sensory overload if I can. My whole lower body was sticking to a seat that could
have been dirty— God knows it was worn—but still the blond hair on my legs was raised, like the fur on a cat’s back, and I
threw my torso forward to arch my back, gently landing my red-haired pussy-plane down onto the smooth material of the black
seat.

I’m wet now, and I grow wetter with each stoplight I pass on my way home. I drop my head back, my lips are parted—well, actually,
every lip I own is parted now—and I wonder how long his fingers are.

There’s a look in a man’s eyes—or a woman’s, too, for that matter—when they know how to finger-fuck well. It’s a cocky, strong
look, and usually they’ll have a habit of putting the tip of their tongue into the corner of their mouth when they’re even
thinking about finger-fucking me.

Bent to face me, he has one big hand holding my far
thigh secure, and with the other he’s slowly sweeping his fingers up and down the inside of the thigh nearest to him. (Slow,
gentle, rhythmic moves will be the death of me someday, I’m sure.) His hands, besides being large, are smooth but still a
little rough, especially around the knuckles. Sometimes his hand comes within inches of the tiger. She holds her breath instinctively,
then growls quietly when the fingers manage to escape. All this teasing has made me slick and wet, and the leather seat of
the taxi could be a puddle of olive oil on cheap kitchen linoleum.

Arched back? Yes, my back is arched. It opens my mouth, creating a path that continues unobstructed. Both of my mouths are
open wide, and my body is unconsciously arranging itself so that the tunnels within welcome the visitors from outside. Like
in
Aladdin,
when the sphinx suddenly rises from the sands, throws open its great, vicious mouth, and then rolls out the red carpet—it’s
hard to say no, right? That’s my hungry cunt! Makin’ it hard to say no!