worry,” he told her, “they’ll never be seen in Arkansas.”
She now walked with habitualized rhythm down the corridor, glad to be away from the interminable drone of male voices, and wondered about Margaret, who was already in the small kitchen at the other end of the suite of offices, waiting for her. Joan sensed that the other woman was about to lift matters to a new level of relationship, and while she did not dwell on the particulars of what might be involved, she was charged with a slight expectant randiness that primed her for whatever might take place.
TWO
“Are you nervous?” Margaret stared intently at her visitor. Joan shifted her weight, uncertain as to how to answer.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m perspiring, if that’s any indication.”
“Where are you perspiring?” Margaret asked with a wry smile.
Joan shifted her weight again. “Under my arms, along the insides of my thighs.”
Margaret licked her lips in that way she had, falling somewhere between amusement and invitation. There was a long pause.
“Well, why did you invite me here?” Joan asked.
While the two of them had been making coffee that morning and agreeing that men-at-meetings were the most tedious things in creation, Margaret had asked Joan to dinner at her apartment. Not sure of what was being offered besides food, Joan had felt a tingle of anticipation that something exciting might happen, and after three hours of the conference, she was ready to take anything that offered an antidote to the deadly boredom of business.
In her Chelsea apartment, a single huge room painted Mandarin red with all black furniture and furnishings, except for the bone-white curtains on the windows, Margaret had greeted her, dressed in a transparent canary-yellow dressing gown through which could be seen her legs, the vermilion gash of the panties she wore, and the white fullness of bare breasts tipped with tantalizing glimpses of brown nipples. They had had drinks and a light dinner of broiled whitefish and a tossed salad and garlic bread, followed by strong Turkish coffee and Sherman cigarettes. Now, at ease on a thick rug in front of the fireplace, they were moving into that space of encounter in which the souls of two human beings become naked before one another.
“I asked you here to talk business,” Margaret said.
“That’s a disappointment,” Joan said, stretching out to her full length, her tight slacks folding and creasing behind her knees and at her crotch. Margaret stared for a long moment at the bulge between Joan’s thighs, picturing the soft mound, the swamp of hair, the tangled lips beneath, the succulent aromatic hole beneath them. Joan, aware of the other’s gaze, at first went to cross her legs in a reflex movement, then checked herself, and let her thighs fall open. She had promised herself that she would go with the total flow this evening, and while she was unable to initiate anything, she could certainly cooperate with Margaret’s desires.
“I think you have a one-dimensional understanding of business,” Margaret said. “I should have thought that after your relationship with Lou, you might have understood it differently.”
At once, Joan was on the alert. “What do you know of my relationship with Lou?” she asked.
“I’ve seen the movies he made of you,” Margaret told her. And before Joan could say another word, went on, “I’ve seen you with your legs spread wide, a dildo in your cunt and a dildo in your ass, squirming at his feet, begging him to fuck you in the mouth. I’ve seen the one where he gives you to his friends, and after being fucked for four hours, with every hole red and raw, still unsatisfied, you stuffed your fingers in your cunt and rubbed yourself until you were wracked with shuddering orgasms, and spent, weak, crawled up to the men and pleaded with them to fuck you again. Until they had to pick you up and throw you in a bathtub of ice-cold water to snap you out of