Ed McBain - Alice in Jeopardy

Is she building up to kicking him out of here? Once, in St. Louis, he made the mistake of hitting on a flight attendant staying at the same Holiday Inn he was, but it turned out she was a friend of the flight attendant he’d fucked two weeks earlier. Gave her the same line. Only she knew the line already because her friend had told her all about him. So she let him buy her dinner and walk her back to her room, even invited him in for a drink, where he kept giving her the same jive he’d given Gwen — that was the first girl’s name — two weeks earlier. She finally told him he should change his line at least as often as he changed his underwear, and showed him the door. Couldn’t even remember her name now, the bitch, but was this the same thing here? Was Jennifer getting him all hot and bothered only to turn him out into the night?

“Aren’t you afraid she might see your truck where you parked it?”

“She won’t be going near the airport. Anyway, what I do is my business.”

“Oh? Is that right? Have you got some kind of arrangement or something?”

“No, but I’m my own man.”

“Oooo, big macho man,” she says.

“Look,” he says, “if you’re not—”

“Be still,” she says.

“I mean, I’m married, okay? If that—”

“I said be still.”

She moves away from him, glides to the bar, sets her empty glass down in front of the bottles arrayed there, and then lifts the folding top, closing the bar. As she turns back to him, she lets the black silk robe slide from her shoulders. And then she is fiddling with the silken cord at her waist, loosening it, untying it, allowing the pajama bottoms to slide down over her thighs and her knees, bunching at her ankles, stepping out of them in her high heels and taking a stride toward him, the palms of her hands flat on her naked thighs now.

Her pubic hair is black.

“Are you sure you prefer blondes?” she asks, and when he doesn’t answer, she says, “Why don’t you just come on over here and eat me, hmm?”

By midnight, they have already fucked once and are lying naked on Jennifer’s king-sized bed in a bedroom overlooking a small lagoon in her backyard, getting ready to have another go at it, from the look of things. Rafe feels no guilt whatever; he has done this many times before, with many different women. In fact, he feels exhilarated. She is more spectacularly beautiful than he could have prayed for, lying beside him now with her Miss Clairol Blondest Gold hair spread on the pillow, her legs spread below where her unbleached coal-black hair tufts in crisp anticipation, one hand lying palm up on the pillow above her head, the other hand already stroking his cock again.

The combination of black and blond is somehow very exciting. My head may be fake, it seems to declare, but, baby, what you get down here is the real thing. Moreover, his being able to witness the disparity brings a sense of greater intimacy to their nakedness. Here I am, her bush is saying, this is what I’m really like, and you alone are privileged to see it. Me alone, and ten thousand other guys, Rafe thinks, but he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth or any other open orifice.

What she’s doing now is positioning herself so that she can maneuver the head of his cock against her nether lips. She does this with total disregard for his own needs or desires. It is as if his cock isn’t even attached to him. She uses it like a dildo, pushing the head this way and that until she finds her clitoris and then rubbing herself against it gently at first and then more vigorously and then straddling him completely and sliding herself onto him, wet and open and savage and totally absorbed with pleasuring herself alone. She seats herself firmly and deeply, grabbing her breasts in both hands, working the nipples with thumbs and forefingers, head thrown back, blonde hair above, black below, it is almost like having two women in bed with him.

She keeps him deep inside her, insistently moving her clitoris against his shaft, locked onto his cock, lost in herself, tossing her head, murmuring cunt and fuck and cock and yes and do it and fuck me, and then pulling herself back just on the edge of orgasm, and gliding up to the head of his cock again, almost losing it, capturing it again at the very last moment, and then sliding down deep again, repeating the action, over and over again and again and again, his hands clutching her ass, yes, fuck me, she says, and then screams aloud and hangs above him in agonizing orgasm and flings herself onto him, breasts crushed against his chest, mouth seeking his, tongue lashing, oh jesus, she murmurs, oh jesus.

This is what’s nice about fucking a stranger, Rafe thinks.

She doesn’t bring up the wife again until half an hour later. They always bring up the wife after they’ve been royally fucked, Rafe thinks. Never miss an opportunity to bring up the wife. It’s like they’re thinking, Well, you son of a bitch, now that you’ve had your way with me, let’s discuss this small matter of the little woman back home. They never put it quite that way, of course, he has never met a woman that stupid. Actually, there’s no woman on earth who will ever say exactly what she means. With women, you’ve always got to decode what they’re saying. If a woman says, “Do you think Hawaii is really as nice as they say it is?” what she really means is “I’ve booked a room for two weeks at the Royal Tahitian.” That is the way women talk. The only time women talk straight is when they’re fucking. But that’s not the woman talking, it’s the cunt. The cunt is saying fuck me, not the woman.

That was half an hour ago.

Now it’s the woman talking.

“So tell me,” Jennifer says, “is Atlanta a nice place to live?”

Meaning, “So tell me about this goddamn wife of yours in Atlanta.”

“It’s okay, I guess,” he says.

“Did you ever live anyplace else?”

He almost tells her he spent a year and four months in Reidsville, Georgia, at the correctional facility there.

Instead, he says, “Born and raised there.”

“Your wife, too?”

Here it comes, he thinks.

“No, she’s originally from Peekskill. That’s upstate New York.”

“So how’d she end up in Atlanta?”

Meaning “So how did you meet this fucking wife of yours?”

“She was going to college in Athens. University of Georgia. That’s about sixty miles northeast of Atlanta.”

“So what’d you do? Meet at a prom or something?”

“No, my sister was going to school there, too.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

She nods. She is sitting beside him on the bed, cross-legged, still naked. Her lips are only a trifle pursed. She is thinking this over. About to get pissed off that she went to bed with a married man. And enjoyed it. All of this is beginning to eat at her.

“You are so beautiful,” he says.

Rescue operation.

“Mmm,” she says, and nods again, and pulls a little face.

He is about to get kicked out of here in the middle of the night unless he says something very smart very soon. He knows she won’t believe him if he tells her he doesn’t love his wife, which isn’t true, anyway, or at least he doesn’t think it’s true. He has been to bed with a lot of different women since he met Carol, but never once has he ever stopped loving her, he supposes, although he has to admit that never once has he ever felt like this in bed with another woman. Just lying here beside Jennifer, he is beginning to get hard again. And this is without touching her again or anything, this is just remembering what happened half an hour ago, thirty-five minutes ago. He wonders if he should call her attention to the fact that he is getting hard again, give a wink in the direction of old Willie there, who has a mind of his own, and who certainly isn’t thinking about Carol in a motel someplace on I-495.