I kneaded. The warmth spread. Far from relaxing Old Lucifer, however, the combination of massage and mounting heat made him stand stiffly at attention. I stared down at him in some dismay. Even if I pulled up my bathing trunks, they’d never hide his rigidity. It was one thing—and maybe not too cool a one at that—to ask a strange girl if she’d like to have sex; it was quite another thing to come charging at her with one’s lance at full tilt. If she’d reacted violently to my attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, what might she not do if confronted by Old Lucifer frothing—so to speak -- at the mouth?
Standing up, I whacked Lucifer over the head hard. I figured pain would make him retreat. But he sprang right back up again, snarling.
It was a contest of wills. I rapped him again. He quivered with indignation, but showed no signs of weakening. I slapped him back and forth several times with my hand.
“Do you mind not masturbating all over my Rya rug?”
I don’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me. Her tone was judgmental, but her cobalt eyes were smoldering. She was holding two drinks, one in each hand. She forgot to offer me one of them.
“I wasn’t masturba-” I started to deny.
“When I was a little girl growing up in various South American cities, there were street urchins I wasn’t supposed to play with, and they had a phrase they used which I never understood. It obviously referred to something very obscene, but it only confused me. Only when I grew up did I understand the meaning.”
“What was the phrase?”
“ ‘Beat your meat,’ ” she told me. “Of course it loses something in the translation from Spanish.”
“But not much,” I observed. “Look, I wasn’t masturbating, or ‘beating my meat’ if you prefer. I was simply trying to reduce the rigidity induced in my sex organ by the ointment you gave me.”
“My! How clinical we are all of a sudden—‘rigidity’ . . . ‘sex organ.’ . . .”
“All right then! I was trying to uncock my cock!”
“A cockamamic thought.” She smiled.
“You’re cockeyed!” I was getting mad.
“It’s hard -- diffficult, that is—not to be with it staring me right in the face. . . . And that question you asked me when we met in the surf . . . what makes you so cocksure?”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” I crowed. I whacked Old Lucifer back and forth in earnest to show her what.
“You mean it really is a cockfight?”
“Damn right! Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
“Sit down,” she told me. “I think I can help you.” I sat down.
“Put your hands at your sides.”
I put my hands at my sides. My root stuck up from the pubic hair like a palm tree pointing skyward from the underbrush.
She walked over to me. She stopped in front of me and smiled down-—at me or Lucifer, I wasn’t sure. And then she overturned my Scotch and Scotch on the rocks in my lap.
I jumped up with the shock of the sudden cold. Lucifer dived down from the same cause. I sat back down again, decently flaccid.
“You can pull your trunks back up.”
Nice of her to give me permission. I stuffed everything back inside my bathing trunks.
“I’ll make you another drink.”
This time I went with her. The study was more traditionally—and comfortably—furnished. We settled down with our drinks side by side on a small contemporary couch, or, as it’s called, a loveseat.
(A loveseat? Why do they call it that? It’s too short to make love on. Just right for the preliminaries though.)
The redhead gulped her martini. She wasn’t, I could tell, much of a drinker. Still, she’d had a disturbing day what with being knocked unconscious, almost drowning, mistakenly thinking she was being assaulted by a would-be rapist, and now finding herself alone with a masochistic exhibitionist. So she drank it fast. I was still working on my first Scotch when she downed half her second martini at a gulp.
“Keep that up and you’ll pass out,” I advised her.
“Three,” she said. “I can take three. Four knocks me out, but three is okay. Three relaxes me.” She drained her second martini. “Three makes me sexy.” She giggled.
“Have another drink,” I suggested.
She was a little unsteady on her luscious legs as she crossed back over to the bar. “Three does for me what salve did for you.” She giggled again. “Have another salve,” she mimicked me. She poured gin and vermouth into a shaker, dumped in some ice and shook the mixture violently.
Everything shook. The bar; the bikini; the brazen, bronze-topped breasts; the beautiful bottom. Everything shook.
“You’ll bruise the gin,” I told her. “You’re supposed to stir it gently, not shake it to death.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you dig S-M?” She kept shaking.
I raised a mental eyebrow. “S-M” is swingers’—usually married swingers—-code talk for “sado-masochism.” Sexy as she was, she didn’t look old enough or experienced enough to have gone that route.
She must have ESPd my thoughts. “I read a lot,” she explained. “You can relax. I don’t even own a pair of spiked heels, and there’s nary a whip on the premises.” She poured the bruised gin and vermouth from the shaker into a glass, drank off about half the glass, and awarded herself a dividend with what was left in the shaker.
“Do you know why I drink?” she asked. The question was rhetorical. She didn’t wait for me to answer it. “Because my old man has this thing about grass. That’s why. The lengths he goes to, to keep me and Mary Jane apart! You wouldn’t believe it! But booze? Why, that’s the American way! You never saw a more indulgent daddy when it comes to liquor. Yessir! That’s the American way!”
“I didn’t think you were American,” I told her. “At least not from the U.S.,” I amended.
“Well I’m not. But I’m of the U.S.” She giggled. “Half, anyway. Half of me is as of the U.S. as apple pie.” She finished the third drink, dividend and all. “You’re cute.” She changed the subject. “Fresh, too,” she remembered. “The way you came on hack at the beach. That question!” She rolled her cobalt eyes. “Tell me, do you have much success with that approach?” The red curls tossed about her naked shoulders.
“Well, here I am.” I spread my hands and grinned.
“Still cocksure.” She walked to the loveseat and stood over me, looking down. “But maybe you’re all just talk. I mean, you haven’t even made a pass at me yet.”
There are days when I don’t have to be hit over the head with a baker’s dozen of bricks. I got a hand on each of her cushy, warm hips and pulled her down to me. Her mouth was like hot, damp velvet. Her tongue was on a short spring, and it was sharp and burning and a little carefree and spicy with martini. It was a long, exploratory kiss, and the message it sent had Old Lucifer rearing up in his paddock again.
She opened her eyes and noticed. She giggled a little breathlessly. “You should really get yourself a looser pair of trunks,” she advised me.
I was as far from being embarrassed as I was from thinking about former U.S. President Nicholas Dickson. If the kiss had been ultra-warm, the promise it conveyed had been torrid. I drew her back so that she was seated on my lap across the loveseat and went back for seconds.
This time her thighs burned against the throbbing of imprisoned Lucifer. Her sharp little teeth punctured my lower lip like a quick series of hypodermic injections. Her nails dug into my bare shoulders and then clawed their way up my neck to my ear.