Wilma Crane - Family bride

When he heard the front door open and close quietly, he knew that Rich Junior had come in from his cruising of the streets. He looked again at his watch and saw that it was four-thirty. Then, when he heard the squeak of the refrigerator door opening, he knew Rich was looking for something to eat, and he got quietly out of bed, put on his boxer shorts, and sneaked out of the bedroom.

"Out sort of late, weren't you?" he asked Rich, who had sat down at the cigarette-burned kitchen table and was just taking off his shoes.

His son took a swig of beer from the bottle beside him and grinned up at Richard. "Up sort of early, aren't you?" he replied, kicking off his shoe.

Richard opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer.

As he walked over to the kitchen table with it, his son looked up at him and said, "Your legs are as white as a frog's belly. You ought to come surfing with me sometime. The sun would tan you up good."

Richard sat down and opened his beer. "Get any tail?" he asked, his eyes twinkling.

Rich Junior made a grunting sound and screwed up his face. "These American cunts are all cock-teases," he said. "It's hardly worth the effort. I think maybe I'll hop down to T.J. and try a little spic nookie."

"Don't let your mother find out," Richard warned him, gulping his beer.

"Hmmph!" Rich Junior said. He belched a little, then took another swig of beer. "Jim come over today?" he asked casually.

"No," Richard said, contemplating the label on his beer bottle. He tore off a little corner of the label and looked at the underside.

"Can't hardly blame him," Rich Junior observed. "Mom is just busting to tell him what a dope he's being about Val."

"What do you think about it?"

Rich Junior leaned back in his chair and hesitated for a moment before answering his father. "I think it's probably both their faults," he said. "Of course, Jim is so full of novels and shit that he probably doesn't even screw her. I can't blame her for moving out on him in that respect."

"Did he tell you they didn't screw?" Richard asked.

"Nope. But it's easy to see when you look at her that she'd not getting enough cock. Last time she was over here I caught her sneakin' a look at my crotch."

Richard shook his head in bewildered amusement. "Maybe you ought to pick up where your brother left off," he joked.

Rich Junior laughed lowly. He hooked a finger into the leg of his undershorts and scratched at his balls. "She's probably so hard up she'd even fuck you!" he chuckled. "No shit, though," he said soberly. "We oughtn't to talk about her like this."

Richard had been about to mention his dream, but now he thought better of it. He shivered a little because the beer had made him cold and because the oilcloth of the chair was icy.

They sat in silence for a while, each of them pulling at their beer bottles and trying to avoid the other's eyes.

Then Richard stood up and shoved his beer across the table to his son. "You finish it off," he said. "Your mother will smell it on my breath even while she's sawing logs," he added.

Rich Junior looked up at him, his beer poised in the air over the table. "All the same," he said, "I bet Val would be a hot piece in the sheets."

Richard snorted. "Maybe," he said. And then he added, as he started for the bedroom, "If she had the light person pouring the cock to her."

When he got to the bedroom he could see that Frances had changed positions in bed. She had pulled the covers up around her face and only her eyes and nose peeked out from the blankets as he eased himself quietly into the cold sheets beside her.

Beside her elbow on the vanity table were the plastic case for her false eyelashes and a bowl of soggy breakfast cereal. She had been dieting again, and she felt a little crazy with hunger as she looked at her face in the mirror.

Whenever she looked at the make-up advice in Glamor magazine, as she had done that morning, it irritated her to be reminded that her face was "triangular". Girls with triangular faces, she thought, usually looked like weasels or saints, and she hoped she wasn't just rationalizing when she decided that neither description applied to her. She simply looked like a twenty-three-year-old woman who had, whether it showed in her face or not, recently separated from her equally young husband.

Valerie Davis was not beautiful, but men seldom realized this when caught by her charms, as Mike Duckworth was. Her milky-blue eyes were wide-set and clear below her full but well-tweezed smoke-brown brows. And it was probably her broad, high cheekbones that saved her triangular face from giving her the look of Saint Bernadette or a crafty mink. Her complexion, more so when she was not worried or dieting, was extremely fair, with just a hint of pink showing through the velvety skin of her cheekbones. But it was a flawed face, too. She took pains to cover up the defects, but in reality these were part of what made her so attractive to men. As a child she had worried that her nose was not pretty; she had wanted a button nose, like the kind her Irish father so admired. So she had developed a continual habit of pushing the end of her nose up with her finger; it had not given her a button nose, but now the tip of her nose had a slightly upturned effect to it, and there was a faint crease on the tip of it which she now took pains to disguise with powder. Her chin bore the slight trace of a cleft, but beyond that she also had a small scar Mom where she had, as a child, fallen from her first bicycle. This, too, she usually kept camouflaged with powder. Her hair, combed straight and slightly curled under at the ends, framed her face with a smoky brown.

Jim had always teased her about her favorite brand of cosmetics. "White Shoulders," he would say. "That fits you."

Valerie opened the round box of powder and looked down at her nearly naked body. She pursed her lips a little and blew at a piece of cigarette ash that had drifted into the hollow between her shoulder and collarbone. With mild disgust she snubbed out the filter-tipped Salem that lay smoldering in the ashtray on the vanity. Then, with the fluffy white puff, she began to smooth the velvety talc over her neck and collarbone, dipping down low enough to graze the upper curves of her heavy breasts. When she had been in high school, she had been a little ashamed of the huge, jouncing mounds. Now – and she smiled to herself at the realization – she was more than a little silly in the pride she took in them, the more so since her roommate, though her breasts were firmer, was still wearing falsies to make it look as if she were older than fourteen. And it was not particularly strange for Valerie to take such pride in her most obvious point of attraction. It was for this reason that she frequently dieted on the Spartan ration of one bowl of Grape Nuts per day and numerous cups of black coffee. In this way, she maintained her one-hundred-thirty-five-pound figure as an attractive showcase for her pleasantly large breasts.

She gently rubbed the talc over their curves, feeling slightly perverted as the tickle of the powder puff caused her hen's-egg-brown nipples to erect. The grapefruit-sized mounds were resilient beneath her fingertips as she slyly squeezed them, testing for any sign of fat. She was well satisfied that she was not really gaining weight; but to make doubly sure, she tossed the powder puff into its cardboard box and forced herself to take another spoonful of the cold, mushy breakfast food.

When she had swallowed, she curled her upper lip and stuck her tongue out at her image in the mirror.

"Yuck!" she cried to the reflection. Then she put the spoon down in the bowl and stood up.

As she turned away from the mirror, the pert hillocks of her blue-nylon-covered buttocks reflected in the glass. She looked back over her shoulder and rubbed softly at her thighs, where a slight red mark had been made by the edge of the vanity stool. The flesh of her big breasts quivered as she walked across the bedroom carpet to her closet. When she opened the closet door, once again she was greeted by a full-length-mirror image of herself. She glanced at it thoughtfully, posing a little as she had seen Jeanne, her roommate, do in fashion shows.