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“Valerie, are you trying to tell me you haven’t slept with anyone since then?”

“I can’t! Don’t you understand? I’m scared.”

“You wouldn’t get pregnant again. I mean, you know better than that now.” He shook his head. “Valerie—”

“I don’t know why. You don’t understand.” She was trembling again, her face turned away from him. “I thought . . . you’re really the only person I know.”

The full tragedy of that statement hit him with a force he hadn’t anticipated. Valerie, the bane of his existence, the woman who spoke to him mainly in threats and demands—had no one else. He held her close, trying to think what to do. Would sleeping with her be a betrayal of Emily? But Emily was a porn star; she would be sleeping with another man next Wednesday. Furthermore, her infidelity would be broadcast to millions of homes. Under those circumstances, it was hard to know what the rules were.

He said softly, “If that’s really what you want, Valerie—of course I’ll do it.”

“Oh, wow,” she said into his neck. “Thank you.”

Then, suddenly, she was kissing him. Her lips were soft and warm, which surprised him, although of course it shouldn’t have surprised him. Weren’t all lips soft and warm? As her body moved against him, his body began to awaken, a fugitive electricity passing through his groin. Fucking Valerie—of course the possibility had always been there. Perhaps that repressed desire was even part of their mutual hostility.

Still, he had to tell himself to touch her breast, and as he did it, he was filled with a strange misgiving. He was breaking a personal taboo created thirteen years ago and always observed. It was again surprising to him that her breast was full, soft, in every way a desirable female breast. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could feel the rounded shape of it, the still-soft peak of her nipple. His cock stirred now in his pants, stiffening and straightening. He was getting hard kissing Valerie. Although the idea was strange, there was something about it that felt right. They were coming full circle. Somehow it felt as if this might heal the rift between them after all these years.

He began to undress her gently, and she allowed it, raising her arms and shifting her hips to accommodate him with a brave look on her face. When she was finally nude, she sat up straight and took a deep breath, seeming to regain her confidence. He remembered suddenly that this was what she did for a living. The traumatized near virgin was a nude spokesmodel on TV. He said, “You’re so beautiful, Val,” hoping to add to her comfort; being beautiful was her stock in trade.

But a shadow passed over her face. She looked away from him. “Then why didn’t you ever want to sleep with me again? All that time.”

He almost blurted out,
I’m not that important to you. I can’t be.
But he mastered himself and said, “We had a lot of bad history. You know that.”

“It didn’t have to be bad.” She looked at him again, her blue eyes touchingly young and vulnerable.

He knew if they kept on talking, the sex would get derailed. So he said, “Stay where you are,” and got down on his knees next to the sofa. “Just don’t move.”

He started by stroking her thighs, moving his palms from the knee up to the tender softness where her legs joined. He was letting his palms graze the skin lightly, waiting for her to begin to feel it instead of bracing herself against what might come next. At last, her muscles relaxed. Her legs parted ever so slightly, and he took that as the cue to move upward, stroking her belly now. Then he let his fingers travel very slowly up the lower curve of her breasts, until one fingertip rested on each nipple. Moving those fingers in delicate, slow circles, he excited her nipples into hardness. He was rewarded by hearing her breath come faster; her lips had parted and she was breathing through her mouth, her eyes fixed with that youthful, pleading expression on his face.

He bent his head to kiss her on the knee, then moved his mouth up her thigh, bringing his hands down to gently part her legs. He kissed and licked her inner thigh then, tasting the soft flesh there that was impossibly smooth despite her deep Hollywood tan. Of course, her pussy was entirely hairless—that was part of her job—but in his mind it was associated with the virgin thing. Valerie the Untouched; her immaculate skin and hairless pubic area made her seem like a pure creature he was about to defile. He guided her legs farther open and could smell the dark aroma of her cunt, see the pink complications of the inner labia. As she realized what he was doing, she tensed again.

So he started by kissing her mound of Venus lovingly, patiently, little chaste kisses intended to reassure her. When she relaxed, he moved down to kiss the lips of her pussy, trying to gauge by the tiny reactions of her muscles how he was affecting her. When at last he ran his tongue over her inner labia, she moaned longingly, and he knew it was going to be all right. He let his tongue play lightly over her clitoris then, and now the tension in her thighs was from mounting pleasure. Caressing her thighs lightly, he licked her clitoris, up and down, the sweet-salty taste of her seeming like a benediction of what he was doing. When he slipped his tongue inside her for a second, she squirmed and gasped. He followed the tongue with a finger and felt the contractions in her vagina beginning. He wondered if Valerie had ever had an orgasm. It was impossible to believe that that hurried, graceless sex they’d had when she was fifteen had made her come. Most girls would have experimented with masturbation, but Valerie was such a strange person, as angry at herself as she was at other people.

With this in his mind, he set to work more passionately, alternating between teasing her clit with the tip of his tongue and then letting his tongue flatten over it and twist back and forth. She was moaning steadily now with each breath, lying back with her legs spread to give him full access to her. He spread her pussy lips with his fingers to intensify the sensation as he tickled her cunt all over with his tongue. Time seemed to stop while he imagined her pleasure, concentrating on each caress, half experiencing her responses in his own nerves. Her wetness was making him slightly crazy, his cock straining in his pants.
And then I’ll fuck her,
he kept thinking.
Everything will be all right.

At last she began to lift her hips off the sofa, straining to find that conclusive sensation, the final release. He licked her harder and worked two fingers into her cunt, moving them gently to deepen the feeling. It worked; she suddenly stiffened, a shrill cry coming from her mouth, and her cunt exploded in a hundred fierce contractions.

Even as she fell back on the sofa, her limbs loose, her face dazzled, he was pulling down his pants and putting his cock against her crotch. She looked at him, baffled at first. She was smiling.

He said, breathing hard, “Is it okay? Are you ready?”

Then she realized and her face went blank. In a frail whisper, she said, “Yes. That’s what I wanted. Please.”

He thought of embracing her, but changed his mind. Instead, he reached out and took her hand in his, pressing it lovingly. At the same time, he guided his cock into her, the wetness of her cunt receiving him easily even as its tightness resisted the invasion. She cried out faintly as he pressed it all the way in, and caught his breath. His cock was throbbing, almost raw with the need for release. He couldn’t stop himself from fucking her then; he was fucking her even as he told himself to stop, to take breath, to ask if she was all right. He was fucking her, the sweet friction of his cock in her molten pussy maddening him. He was fucking into her ongoing contractions—could she still be coming?—his cock aflame and iron hard. On one level, she was a beautiful blonde, lying back with her legs open to let him do whatever he liked. On another level, she was Valerie, whom he pitied and hated and feared. But fucking her felt so natural that he realized he must have been wanting to do it all along, subconsciously. His pity and hate and fear must have all been keener from the strangled urge to tear her clothes off and fuck her into oblivion.

His orgasm came suddenly and so powerfully that his vision went black for a moment while the impulses tore through him. He was freeing years of repressed desire and hate in a single long blow of ecstasy. He cried out and Valerie was crying out with him, her hand convulsing in his.

Then he was lying on her breast, muttering, “Thank you, beautiful Valerie. Thank you.”

She began to stroke his hair shyly, saying, “No, I asked you. . . . I should thank you. . . .”

He said, teasing, “So, are you still going to be a virgin now?”

To his alarm, she stiffened under him. She said, “That’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Maybe we should both get dressed.”

Then she was pushing him away. A second later, she was standing over him, pulling her clothes on hurriedly.

“Valerie, I was just kidding,” he said, mystified. “I don’t care what you say on TV. I know it’s just a fantasy, not a lie. Come back.”

She said, “Pull up your pants, Ralph.” Her voice was tense but not angry, as he’d feared. He got to his feet and did as she said, wondering what was going on. When they were both dressed, she sat back down on the sofa as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He sat back on the armchair, his nerves in disarray, the thrill and intimacy of the minute before still present as a sleepy confusion in his limbs.

She began formally, “I had a speech prepared for you. I was so sure you were going to say no—to spite me, if for no other reason.”

He was about to object, but swallowed it. “I guess that’s fair. I might have reacted that way.”

“Thanks,” she said, and her face softened a little. “I don’t know why I never said this when it might have . . . Well, it would never have done any good. This is the speech, in a few sentences.” She took a deep breath and looked out the window, speaking as if to herself. “I only kept Ilana because I was in love with you. I thought you would eventually see . . . I thought I could keep you.”

“I knew—”

“Don’t. You didn’t know. You thought I was crazy.”

There was a pause. At last Ralph said evenly, “Yes. I thought you were crazy.”

She said slowly, sadly, “I didn’t think about having a child at all. When I ran away, I should have stayed away. My mistake was trying to be a mother at all.”

He said softly, “It’s true. You weren’t good with Ilana.”

Valerie made a face. “I’m not ready to feel sorry for her. I don’t understand anything about it. I don’t feel connected to her at all. Maybe if I’d stayed at the beginning . . . but after I gave birth, I couldn’t stop crying. I just wanted to undo it all.”

“You’re right. You should have told me.”

“I’m making the whole speech,” she said, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. “This is awful. Listen, Ralph.” She turned to him again, her blue eyes tense. Her hair was disordered and her brow glistened with sweat. She said, “I want you to do me one more favor, and then I’ll be out of your life. Your life and Ilana’s.”

He took a deep breath. He tried to focus on Ilana, what she would need in years to come. Nothing came to him; every choice seemed impossible. Children needed mothers, but Valerie had never really been a mother. Probably she never would be. At last he said, “You might change your mind.”

Valerie’s eyes filled with a dull despair. “You mean I might feel something for her someday. But then we wouldn’t have these problems, would we?”

“No.”

“I’d be a different person,” she said. “Don’t wait for me to be a different person. Help me now.”

“What do you need me to do?” A chill ran down his spine, and he realized he was still afraid of Valerie.

She said with a calm that seemed superficial, covering he couldn’t tell what dark emotion, “I need you to be my first. Officially. I need you to fuck me on television. Like you did just now.”

Her insistence struck him funny at first, and he struggled not to smile. Laughing at Valerie would be a terrible mistake at this moment. Then a sudden fury gripped him as he thought,
She was manipulating me. This was all a setup.

He found himself saying, in a cold and hateful voice he didn’t recognize, “I can’t do that. I’ve told you.”

Her demeanor changed instantly. In the blink of an eye, she was the Valerie he remembered: cold, angry, ugly in some indefinable way that had nothing to do with her physical features. The idea that he’d just made love to her made his skin crawl.

She said, “You have to do it. It’s absolutely necessary.”

He said, “It ends here, Valerie. You can go fuck yourself.”

Then he was on his feet, a blind rage making his movements uncoordinated. He was stumbling toward the door, barely able to contain the urge to turn and hit her in the face. At the same time, he was already sick at himself for losing his temper. He hadn’t said any of the things he needed to say. He hadn’t even brought up Emily. Valerie had run the whole show, gotten him to . . .

As he opened the door, he turned and said, in the calmest voice he could muster, “I came here to tell you something, too. I’m in love with Emily Lister. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. I advise you not to try.”

He left and shut the door hard, heading off with the image in his mind of his last view of Valerie—tears running down her face, crumpled and small and needing something from him that made him hate her—again.

 

 

 

 

Z
aza blinked at the invitation. The lettering was script, embossed in gold, and it was actually hard to read; she had to angle it away from the light. It said: