The Darts of Cupid: Stories by Edith Templeton Read Free Book Online

is his dressing room and now he’s looking for some pajamas. I’m hanged if I want to know what color pajamas he wears.
    I heard a hinge creak, and then the light was turned off. The next moment, he was in bed with me, with one side of his body covering mine, and taking hold of my shoulders and hurting them in his grip. I turned my head away. "I must be sick again," I said.
    He sat up, passed one arm under my waist and one under my back, drew me to a sitting position, propped me up, and tore apart the blackout curtains on the window; he slid the sash up. "Here, go right ahead," he said. He steadied me against his chest and laid his arms round me while I was shaken by my violent heaving.
    Unlike the tall elegant windows in the front part of the house, this was a modern low window, with the sill about a foot beneath my head. It was a moonlit night. And while I was being sick I noticed, with that part of one’s mind that remains lucid and observant in any calamity, a pair of motoring gloves laid on the outside ledge. They were of an expensive make, with backs of pigskin and palms of crocheted yarn, and I was furiously ashamed when I saw that I had spattered them with my vomit.
    "Finished?" he asked, laughing loudly.
    "Yes, thank you," I said.
    He propped me up against the pillows. I heard him moving about and I opened my eyes when I felt the light through my closed lids. He brought a basin and sponged me with warm water, gave me a lotion for rinsing my mouth, and dried me. Then he laid me down flat. I saw he was wearing nothing but his open pajama coat.
    The light went out and he was in bed with me once more, extended over the full length of my body once more, with his virility pressing against my closed thighs while he grasped my wrists, raised my arms, and forced them to close round his neck.
    "I’ve got to be sick again," I said. He released me and straightened up, and held me and supported me as he had done before, and as before I soiled the motoring gloves on the ledge and was desperate with shame at their sight. My shame was mingled with fury and indignation toward him for having wanted to make love to me, and at the same time I was flooded with gratitude.
    This time, after he had cleaned me and put the lights out, he did not cover me with his body but came and lay by my side. "No more, worse luck," he said. "You are too weak now. There is nothing to think about and nothing to worry about. Go to sleep."
    He turned me on my flank and pulled my nightgown up under my armpits. He placed my head against his chest and slid his arms about me and entwined his legs in a bewildering, complicated grip with mine, till my body was entirely enwrapped and enclosed and imprisoned in his, and as I drew a trembling breath and tried to stir he pressed me yet more closely to him and held me in utter captivity.
    Mrs. Dicks had on one occasion, when she had tried to ingratiate herself with our crowd, brought to the office a valuable collection of prints drawn by the most famous Japanese masters between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. They showed men with men, men with women, and women with women, all partly clothed, in the greatest variety of voluptuous pleasures. I had looked through them hastily, ashamed of my interest and reluctant to admire the possession of the woman whom I disliked. The only picture I remembered clearly forever after was one unlike any of the others, perhaps because it was fantastic and thus lacked the realism of the others. It was starkly timeless; it had a fairy-tale quality. It was a naked woman, dead, floating in the sea, with an octopus, larger than man-size, fastening round her and holding, caressing, and penetrating her with his many arms. Her face was serious, with that air of deep abandon and satisfaction that may be given to those who have been granted their most heartfelt desire. Her spread-out tresses, the waving algae, the undulating water—black, whitish, gray, and suffused with green—now