Nikki (4 page)

“Of course not.”

He stopped at a store and brought out a sack of food, then drove out to one of the nicer motels, registered without her showing herself at the office, and drove back to their cabin. The minute she was inside she knew he’d been soaping her, that his promise was as worthless as ever.

Moving briskly, he set the groceries on the luggage bench at the foot of the bed, locked and chainlocked the door, closed the Venetian blind, and pulled the drape, doubly concealing them. Flushed and bright-eyed, he looked at her with a quick grin.

She looked at him with enormous, reproachful eyes and said faintly, “You promised.”

He bent and kissed her forehead. “You knew this had to come.” He chuckled, strode away, perched on the edge of a chair and took off his shoes. “Didn’t you?” he demanded, standing up.

Yes, she thought, and said nothing, standing rigidly just inside the door. The room registered on her senses only as something small and murky surrounding the immense glassy peach-colored surface of the bed. She stared at the bed, then at Truck, who was taking his sweater off over his head, looking like a blinded Colossus.

“Whew!” he threw his sweater down. “It’s hot in here!”

“I’m cold.” Her throat and voice quivered. She backed against the wall, clenching her buttocks and holding her feet and knees tightly together as he came toward her in his big stockinged feet like some resistless elemental force, his huge hands reaching. Unprotesting, she watched his hands, surprised at the steady patience with which they unbuttoned her coat, button by button. He pulled her forward and took the coat off. “I’m
cold
,” she cried thinly. “Fred,
please
… I’m scared … I’m scared of you.” He stared voraciously down at her. “I’m scared, Fred. You’re so
big—
”

“Big? Look!” He went down on his knees. “Now you’re bigger.” He bent to her feet, took off her shoes. He stood up, spanned her waist and, lifting her thin young body upright, carried it over and stood it on the bed. “I want you to …” he began excitedly, “to get naked and stand like a statue.”

“N-n-no … p-
please
,” her mouth got quivery.

“Do it,” his voice got harsh, “or I’ll rip off your clothes.”

“You w-wouldn’t,” she said, and knew he would. He stood below her, waiting, his fingers working.

Nikki said, “Turn around and don’t look.”

He nodded abruptly, turned and went to the grocery sack and began to rattle around in it. She stared, incredulous that he could think of eating at such a time. His head snapped around; he saw she was still clothed.

“You
want
your clothes ripped off!”

“No … not that.”

“Strip!”

Nikki got her blouse off hastily, unzipped her skirt. Truck hurried into the bathroom with something from the grocery sack. She was sitting in matching bra and black-lace panities, taking off her nylons, when he strode back into the room, naked except for a strap, and crossed to the radiator. She shut her eyes, recoiling from the raw look of his male power, his muscularity, the hairiness of his chest, stomach and shoulders. An animal, a horrid, sickening animal!

He’d been muttering, and he hadn’t even glanced at her exposed body, she realized with a stab of annoyance. When she dropped her bra, exposing her lovely breasts, he was facing the wall, doing something at the radiator. She stood up and stroked her panties down off her hips, letting them drop around her bare feet, then looked sullenly at his back, unpinned her hair and stirred it out sensually around her shoulders. She watched him smolderingly and kicked her panties off the bed.

He turned and came forward as if hypnotized, his eyes at first taking in her whole exciting body. He stopped in front of her and gazed at her feet, then slowly his eyes stroked upward over her legs and belly and thrusting young breasts with such worshipful intensity that her breath quickened a little.

She stared down into his eyes and he said hoarsely, “Turn around.”

She felt a small fever in her skin, crawling inch by inch as he looked at her back, but somehow, somehow she remained tight, cold and uninvolved. She flinched as his thick hands caught her and laid her down on the bed. Her heart throbbed, and she felt a brief stimulation as mild as the lowest voltage on the electricity machine. Then even that was gone.

“Shut your eyes,” he said, and she obeyed, and lay waiting, expecting. But her neck was tense, her belly sucked in, and all she could think of was the physical pain ahead.

She felt a series of small cold shocks, on the nipples of her breasts, and she gasped and opened her eyes and couldn’t understand what was happening except that he was putting something white and moist on her from a waterglass.

“What are you
doing
, putting
snow
on me?” she cried.

“Now, doll,” he said in a trembling voice. “Now doll. I
tried
to warm it up. It’s whipped cream …”

“
What?
” She sat up wildly … he flattened her at once.

“Lie still, relax. You won’t be cold long.”

He crouched and licked the whipped cream off one breast, then the other, his breathing ragged and uneven.

Nikki tried to turn but he pinned her down. “Delicious doll. Relax, lie still. I’m gonna do it. Just lie
still
.”

She whimpered, and tears scalded down the sides of her temples, but he had his erotic, daring way with her, and it was useless to fight. The sensations began to stir through her, at first like the mild shocks of the electricity machine, then fusing as the intensity of his love-making increased, and never, never, never had there been anything like it. Then she was on fire, and he was on top of her, kissing her face, while his thrilling hot man-body drove at the warm secret core of her and her body opened to him.

On the drive home she sat snugged in close under Truck’s big right arm. He was in high spirits; about all she felt, besides a slight physical pain, was tired.

“I made you a woman tonight! Sorry?”

“Glad.”

He chuckled, gave her an affectionate, rib-cracking hug. “As good as you expected?”

“Better.”

“You couldn’t of been better than I expected … only you were! You know what you’re made out of? Fire.”

She grinned slightly.

“Love me?” he asked.

“Of course, Fred.” She found herself lengthening and stiffening her upper lip, stifling a yawn.

“What’re you thinking about right this minute?”

A hot shower and a deep, deep, long, long sleep. “Fred, don’t
embarrass
me!”

“That’s what I
thought
. Me too!” He chortled.

She often told him honestly during their months as lovers, “You’re my favorite indoor sport.”

But the bed sessions remained isolated from the rest of her life, and, like a hen that starts pecking corn a minute after the rooster dismounts, Nikki practically forgot him once she’d been satisfied. He craved her constantly and let sex dominate him, and presently she found she had the upper hand, taming and mastering a huge dumb beast.

She adored the feel of mastering all that power, but something deeper in her scorned him for allowing himself to be tamed. When finally she forced a break a few weeks before he graduated (and got a professional football contract) she cried a little. But, as she observed to Dolores, who was worrying over her, she was crying only with one eye.

During the final three years of college, males by the score plotted to trap Nikki on beds, but she’d taken only two lovers, and both were vague in her memory. The first had been an instructor, of commonplace appearance but brilliant mind, and shed respected him profoundly and wanted to honor him. She had made herself as beautifully seductive and as tenderly loving as possible, but somehow he never quite lost his self-consciousness and remained a dry, unexcited and unexciting mechanic at sex.

The other, a post-graduate student endowed with a fine mind, good looks, robust health and abundant virility, had miserly fits of worry after every session, afraid he’d exhausted his last driblet of manhood. It had once given her a gleefully sadistic little thrill to re-seduce him immediately after he had used himself up. He took to his bed for a week, sure he was dying, and she had enraged him with daily visits, during which she heartlessly jibed at him and tried to seduce him. Afterward, however, he kept bravely going to the very edge of death with her whenever he could.

However erratic her study habits, she was the top or among the top in every course and she never failed to make the honor rolls; and the more she succeeded academically the more sports activity she allowed herself.

At first there’d been only swimming and diving. Next it was tennis. During swim team training she’d been beating her teammates, most of them of larger frames. By the time of the Spring Meeting they’d surpassed her and she placed no better than fourth in either sprints or middle-distance events. She wasn’t consoled by three firsts and a second in the diving competitions, and she was irritated by Truck’s analysis that she’d never have the power shoulders for championship swimming and being a graceful dainty should stick with diving where form and beauty of motion scored. To strengthen her shoulders she bought a tennis racquet and played the practice wall for a grim hour a day. In the process she developed a brilliant speed and, lusting for a personal victory … at about the time she broke with Truck … she entered the tournament. She reached the quarter-finals that first year, and took school and regional championship the next year. She was chosen for the college tennis team and attended the meeting for the election of officers knowing she had made enemies of every girl there by her relentless, blistering court tactics … and what her teammates did was elect her captain. She got a reputation for the most scathing tongue in the conference, and at times the girls could have murdered her, but they won the conference cup that year and in her senior year when she was again elected captain. She had a go at archery but it seemed too quaint to challenge her. She adored the fencing costume and she would have made the women’s fencing team if she’d had the time and inclination; but stabbing people, even with tipped foils embarrased her, and she felt with a curious reversion to her little-girl character that it somehow wasn’t ladylike.

Throughout every changing, shifting, sometimes hectic interest of Nikki’s college days there remained one constant, and that was Dolores. The feel of her, the pleasure of being alone with her in their impossibly frilly and overly domestic rooms, gave Nikki the deepest satisfaction. All their surface differences seemed only waves on an ocean of unity. Dolores missed her whenever she was gone, and, given half a chance, fussed maternally over her.

One day Dolores said, “I think you’ve got a fever.”

“I’m just about alive. Some day I’ll explain how it feels. Aw, I was just
kidding
, sweet face! But please quit expecting me to get colds or stuff just so you can get me in bed and cluck over me.”

“It’s the only way I’d be sure of ever seeing you.”

“Gee, I know I’m gone a lot. Tell you what, I’ll break my date and we’ll have a swell evening together,” Nikki said.

Dolores reached over and slapped her bottom. “You know
very
well I’m going to a lecture with Ron tonight.”

Nikki rubbed her bottom, grinning. “Oh, Ron.
That thriller
,” she said sarcastically. “You make a good pair.”

Dolores flushed. “I feel like really swatting your tail. That was
very
nasty, Nikki.”

“I dare you, dare you, dare you. Ouch! Hey, you
have
got a wallop! Quit looking so ferocious!” Nikki kissed Dolores playfully on the lips. “Forgive me, Taffy Head?” she pleaded sweetly.

Dolores looked at her meltingly and stroked her face. Nikki shut her eyes and sighed. “That feels so sweet. You’re such a wonderful girl.” She opened her eyes, grinned tartly. “Almost as wonderful as me!” She turned, laughing, and went to the door. “If it’s nice tomorrow afternoon, we’ll golf. Bye-bye, baby!”

For some reason that Nikki found obscure, since she thought Dolores far prettier than she was, the males lusted only mildly for her, while they swarmed around Nikki. Dolores often sought Nikki’s reassurance … and generally got flippancies.

“Men prefer me because I’m richer. Besides, you’re ugly and immoral.”

“Thanks, Nikki. I have a serious problem that makes me unhappy, and my best friend …”

Nikki had been flopped on her back on her bed, doing a few leg raises. She sat up, tailor fashion, on the bed, and looked over at Dolores, who was doing her nails on the other bed. “I get flip because I think you’re ridiculous to worry. A morsel like you can get men by the truckload. The reason the bucks are hot for me is that I give ‘em a to-hell-with-it feeling. If any of them ever managed to seduce me”—her virginity was intact in Dolores’s mind—”and I got pregnant they figure I wouldn’t cause trouble. I wouldn’t
want
to marry ‘em. A soft sweet thing like you, though, they’d feel ashamed and honorable and wind up at a preacher’s. They commit a misdemeanor and wind up with a life sentence. You can see
their
viewpoint. So they don’t fool around. But when a marrying kind of right guy that’s good enough for you comes along, honey … well, don’t you worry. You have all it takes.”

Dolores had met the right one at home the Christmas vacation of her senior year, an attractive man in his middle twenties and already established as a capable executive in his family’s insurance business. She’d walked right from the commencement ceremony to the big Interdenominational Chapel to marry Jim Thelton.

Both Nikki’s and Dolores’s parents were at the wedding. Dolores’s father, a round and amiable midwesterner, mayor of his small Ohio city for three terms, wept openly at the ceremony, as did the mother, a rangy, homely but very sympathetic woman. Even Nikki’s parents got moist about it. Nikki could barely keep from giggling, and after the wedding she made a scene.

Flinging her arms around the groom’s neck, plastering herself to him and staring up with mock soulfulness into his eyes, she’d said, “I don’t think of this, Jim, as losing a girl friend, but rather as gaining a boy friend.” Whereupon she’d surged upward and given him a long kiss on the mouth.