Roger Fitzgerald: The Hollywood swappers

"What's so funny? What did I say, Don?" His laughter increased to almost a roar. "Stop it! Please stop it!" she screamed, suddenly afraid of him.

Don settled down for a moment, still smiling his lewdly contemptuous smile. Lisa was terrified at the grin on his face, and for the first time since she had known him, she was aware that there was more to his smile than mirth. "Why-why are you laughing at me?" she asked.

"I suppose you could call it a private joke. I've never been used by a woman, baby… never!"

Lisa sipped at her drink. She was beginning to feel slightly dizzy again. The movements in the room were slowing down, and the fire made it much too hot for her. She wanted to hurry and undress upstairs and climb into bed.

"I told you," she said, "I didn't want us to go that far."

"Sure you did. Don't you think for one minute that I'm going to believe you. You work well, and fast. I never saw a woman so eager to fuck."

"Don!" she exclaimed, unable to say anymore. The word had shocked her, but the thought it conjured up only excited her. She could not understand the sudden erection of her nipples as he had said it. She stared down into the blood red of her drink, aware of that same familiar tingling of her body that had led to her earlier loss of control, and she trembled slightly. It couldn't be happening to her again! She couldn't be letting herself be betrayed by her body yet another time! She kept her eyes lowered, hoping that Don hadn't seen the brief shivers that had left her shaking almost imperceptibly as she sat before him.

"Now, don't worry, Lisa," she heard him say. "There's no need for Charles to know about any of this. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, and besides, if I told him, that wouldn't be very good for us, would it?"

Lisa looked up quickly into the obscenely smiling face of the man she had worshipped as a teenager, and to whom tonight, she had given her body, and saw at once the full import of what he had said mirrored there with unmistakable clarity.

"You don't mean…" she stammered. "You can't mean you expect this to happen again?"

"Sure, baby. Why not. We're great together… when, and if, we don't turn each other on any more, we can go back to being ordinary neighbors… I mean, come on, grow up – great sex is something to take advantage of, not run away from. Shit… if you were older, you'd understand how hard it is to come by something as great as we were tonight." He rolled his eyes heavenward and sighed. "You've got my kind of hot little cunt baby… and I've got all the cock you could ever ask for."

Lisa gasped at the purposefully shocking language he was using, and then stood up abruptly, moving angrily toward the window. "There is no need to talk like that," she said staring out at the moonlit sea.

"Oh, dear… such a sweet little innocent… bitch…"

Lisa whirled to face Don Carpenter, stunned and totally confused by the abrupt change of manner.

"You're not going to play Shirley Temple with me, baby… not for a minute. You loved every minute of what happened tonight, just like I knew you would… and now you…"

"Like you knew I would?" Lisa repeated, a sudden chill growing in her breast.

Don paused, looking up at her, and then his face broke into a large, confident grin.

"That's right, sugar," he said with sadistically quiet emphasis. "Like I knew you would." He watched as Lisa sank back down on the bed, dumbfounded, not knowing what to make of his surprising revelation. He saw her small mouth working helplessly around the unspeakable question. "How did I know? Very simple. I could tell you hadn't been getting any from your husband in a long time, but that was only enough to put you in the right frame of mind. You needed a little help to go all the way, and you swallowed some of that help just a few minutes ago."

Don couldn't help laughing out loud as Lisa's eyes slowly left his, and came to rest on the mound between her thighs, which was once again beginning to tingle with excitement.

"Yes, my sexy little neighbor, those wonderful, wonderful white pills…"

Lisa gasped audibly as she suddenly realized what Don had done to her…

"You… you… bastard!" she cried out. "Get out! Get out of my house… get out…" she was almost hysterical.

Don ignored her spluttering and calmly reached over to pour himself a refill of the Bloody Mary, and used it to wash one of the white pills down his own throat.

"Now calm down, darling," he finally said. "Calm down…"

Don looked at his neighbor's distraught young wife, at the sexy swirls of her long blonde hair as it tumbled in alluring disarray across her perspiring forehead, at her heaving breasts and turgid nipples so clearly outlined under the thin material of her dress, and smiled.

"I wouldn't grin if I were you," she told him. "Because I'm going to tell Charles… I'm going to tell him everything…"

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Don said.

"And why not?" she asked, feeling more confident having made the decision to confess.

"I don't think you'll tell him because if you do… I can see that he winds up on the street chasing ambulances for a living…"

"How could you… you're just bragging now, you phony…"

"Oh really… let me tell you something… Farley Greendawn owes me a favor… a big favor… and Farley Greendawn owns your husband right now. One word from me and his entire career will go up in a thin puff of smoke."

Lisa felt the room swirl just momentarily as she heard Don Carpenter's words, and tried desperately to compose her face into some semblance of control. But she was trapped and there was no way to hide it. Her world was tumbling down on top of her like a fallen fortress whose walls had been demolished by a tremendous onslaught of cannon fire. Fear was building in her, but so was another unexplained emotion. For the first time in her life she knew that she was completely at another person's mercy, and she was surprised to find that she wasn't as frightened of that fact as by the uncertainty that life now held for her.

"Do you still want to tell Charles, darling…? How would it feel to move from Bel-Air to a crummy rent-controlled apartment in New York."

"Don…" she started to argue with him, but knew there were no words that would change his mind. "What about Rachel? She'll find out sooner or later."

"You still don't see the whole picture, honey." Don laughed. "Rachel and I have no secrets, my pet. And the only thing she's studying tonight are the contours of some young stud's body. She's at an orgy in Topanga."

Lisa sat motionless as her neighbor lowered himself to the couch beside her. To her horror she also felt a familiar tingling between her locked thighs, a tingling she knew now had come only from the insidious pill she'd been given.

Don continued. "I'm going to see a lot more of you, starting now."

"What do you mean?" the distraught young woman asked, between the soft sobs that were beginning to come from her throat. The shock she had suffered, realizing that he was not the kind of man she had thought, still clouded her mental senses and she could not quite grasp what he wanted.

"You're not stupid, Lisa. Figure it out for yourself."

"You don't mean that you expect this affair to continue…"

"Precisely. You enjoyed it as much as I did… maybe more. We can continue for as long as its good with no trouble from your husband… You're trembling… you're afraid?"

Lisa could not answer. Her voice caught in her throat, and though the room was quite warm, she shivered all over with tiny chills. It might have been easier for her if she hadn't already submitted to this horrible monster once. But the thought of making love with him a second time moved another uncontrollable shudder through her helpless body.