Anonumous - The prodigal virgin

“He is not a son of a gun,” protested Edith warmly. “He is very quiet and considerate and courteous, except, well, that is to say…”

Her voice trailed off in a certain confusion which made her husband give her a keen glance.

Other little incidents of the kind, each trivial in itself but all pointing to some hidden significance, had finally roused Henry Hamilton’s curiosity regarding the actual relations of his lovely brunette wife and her only brother. And this, instead of causing any resentment to mingle with his curiosity over the possible physical familiarities which might have occurred between this fine pair in their earlier family life, only stimulated a distinctly perverse brooding in his mind.

He had gone so far once as to accuse Edith of being in love with Herbert.

“What a perfectly foul joke!” she had gasped, turning scarlet. “Why, he’s my brother and being ‘in love’ implies a willingness or a desire to do all sorts of things together! You ought to know by this time whether I really care for any man except you, and you’re being horrid!”

“Well,” he expostulated, “don’t take it so cursed seriously, Edith. Every girl with a nice brother is more or less in love with him and I don’t see any harm in it if they are inspired to lollygag with each other a little. Blanche and Bernice never used to cut up if I happened to see them without their nighties.”

He did not add that his older sisters had never even been aware of his boyish, sensual curiosities regarding their bodies nor of his sometimes successful attempts to see them unclad.

Edith gave him a sidelong, quick glance.

“Well, of course-“ she murmured.

“Of course?” he queried eagerly as she paused.

“Nothing-I meant that if it just happened-and if it was all in fun-it might conceivably be excusable.”

“Certainly it would be ‘excusable.’ It would be more than excusable if it gave them any pleasure,” he affirmed. “Do you mean to maintain, for instance, that it would be any more blameworthy for Herbert to massage your naked titties-your own brother, whom you’d known always-than it was for Jack Birdsall to do that same thing the very first night you met him?”

“Well, good heavens, that was just a forfeit that I had to pay at a rather wild party!” argued Edith. “He just put his hands inside my corset-if you can call that wisp of thing a corset. There was no way I could stop him, was there, without being a spoil-sport? And it wasn’t ten minutes later that you had both your hands on Polly Jackson’s bare behind and then had to bring it out and kiss it before the whole crew when you failed to guess whose bottom it was!”

“I know, Good Lord-you’ve never heard me kick at any of our robust fun with our friends!” said Henry. “But what I was asking was whether it would not have been fully as allowable for Herbert to play with your body as for a man who was not relation to you?”

“Yes, it would,” Edith replied with some agitation. “It would be even preferable. But when you make a licentious thing of it…”

Satisfied with her confession, Henry abandoned the topic for the time. But his mind dwelt now on the party to which they had referred. He chuckled.

“That was a red-hot one, that party, wasn’t it, girlie?” he commented. “And I think about the best fun of all was when we found out that Violet Britt and Pembroke Houghton had gone and got themselves engaged to be married that day, and we got them both well soused and then said we couldn’t consent to their marriage unless they showed each other everything they had. They were so pickled that she at last took it all quite seriously, thinking that they really had omitted a necessary formality.

“He’s a devil, though, that Pembroke! I don’t think he was as soused as he tried to appear. Remember how the girls brought Violet in at last, without a stitch on her little body, and how gravely Pembroke entered then from the opposite door, stark naked? And we shoved them together in the center of the room. They were only supposed to look each other all over in the presence of the whole crowd. But she was weeping maudlinly and he commenced to hug her and console her. And damned if they didn’t both get so hot that they rolled on the rug together! And Violet would have gotten hers right then and there if we hadn’t intervened. That was certainly a warm number!”

“That was going pretty far!” smiled Edith, shaking her head. “We were all pretty soused, as far as that goes. That’s the only excuse there was for such a rank gambol as that.”

“I think it’s devilish good sport to be as pagan as possible,” averred Henry stoutly. “It adds to the gaiety of life. And there’s no permanent harm from any of it.”

His wife shook her head again.

“That was going too fearfully far,” she maintained. “An engaged pair-and she only eighteen and a virgin!”

“Well, damn it, her young aunt was there-and laughing harder than anybody else!” remarked Henry. “And she’s supposed to be responsible for Violet. Though, if you ask me, this newly engaged girl wouldn’t have cried at all if she’d been sober. She’s a torrid young sketch. Didn’t I see her running her bare toes deliberately into Stan Cochrane’s crotch when they were playfully wrestling on the beach?”

“The blamed thing was sticking up,” observed Edith reminiscently. “I saw it too and it seems to me that it tries to burst out of his bathing suit the minute he sees the least thing. I suppose it intrigued Vi. And since she couldn’t very well thrust a hand at it, she just felt it with her foot.”

Struggling for some time from the depths of dense slumber, Edith Hamilton had been dimly aware that something infinitely pleasant was happening to her. Her first semi-conscious thought was that she was emerging from a dream in which she was naked and held to a nude man, a man who caressed her with tender licentiousness, and a man whose whole swollen affair throbbed to the pressure of her rubbing belly. She came yet further toward the surface of reality. Reason began to assume a certain semblance of control, and facts and memory stood out more clearly.

No-it was real. What was the matter with Henry tonight? She thought that she had dozed off, weary but happy, after giving herself to him with one of their customary frenzies of delight. And here he was again wanting more.

“Henry, be reasonable, it must be very late,” sighed Edith. Her eyes were still closed. She was in an agreeable torpor, her flesh quivering to this male contact but not yet willing to surrender its lethargy.

The man by her side was panting. He seemed terribly inflamed. Slowly he was pressing her upon her back, now he was lying upon her.

“I have no idea what has come over you, Henry,” she murmured. “It can hardly be an hour since. And you never do it twice in a night. I’ll stay asleep, I think. You’ve never had a sleeping woman, have you, Henry? See if you can make me wake up. But don’t make those snorting noises, Henry, you’ll awaken poor Herbert. And if he hears us doing this the dear will go wild. He’s so very passionate, the precious! Oh, how very big you seem tonight. O-o-oh-easy now, darling-or all my nice little swoon will be gone.”

There was a light rustle and then the whisper, in a voice recognizable as that of her husband:

“All right, dear, keep on drozing. I’ll fuck you in this trance, and if you howl suddenly and bite me in the shoulder don’t blame me. I feel very hot and passionate tonight and that makes my prick about as big as Herbert’s. He has a corker, the old rascal, hasn’t he?”

“Oh, it’s very, very big-and very lovely!” sighed his deliciously reclining partner in this colloquy.