CHAPTER THREE
The next morning found Victoria once again out walking, by herself this time. Although the day was just as beautiful as the one before, the young coed walked with her head down, her beautiful blonde hair falling forward so that it half-hid her troubled face. Clearly Victoria was worried. Perhaps in another ten years she might look back on her present problems as almost humorously trivial, but now they loomed before her like a granite mountain.
Of course, the main problem was sex, or the fear-filled anticipation of it. What should she do? What could she do? Like so many other young virgins, Victoria had heard from the time she was a little girl that someday some man was going to do something to her. Something so awe-inspiring and important that at first it could only be hinted at. Over the years a kind of instinctual dread mixed with breathless anticipation had built up in the growing girl's mind, so that now, even though her peer group and various sex-education courses had informed her beyond a doubt of what was going to happen, there was still an inbred aura of mystery and fear about the prospect of her first sexual encounter with a male.
What Victoria had ended up with was a classic case of expectations exceeding the offered realities. The panting fumblings of her teenage male classmates had been miles and miles from the expected earth-shattering revelations on the road past virginity. Although Victoria had many times before become sexually aroused as some young student ran his trembling hands over her ripely budding body, the mere sight of the starving-animal look on his face had been enough to make the sickened girl pull disgustedly away. Eventually she had gained a reputation for frigidity.
In itself the problem would have been bad enough, but living with Penny had made it almost unbearable. Time after time Victoria had had sex waved in her face as her roommate brought home droves of young men. On several occasions Victoria had to leave the room she shared with her dark-haired classmate, knowing it was that or sit by a knuckle-chewing frustration while Penny proceeded to make love to her young man of the moment, not even seeming to care that there was someone else watching.
Victoria's answer to this unwanted vicarious sexual stimulation had been to take refuge more and more often in lonely and secret masturbation, and this was beginning to bother her now. The young blonde was not a particularly guilt-ridden person, and for her, masturbation had begun as a fairly innocent exploration of her developing young body but then slowly developed into a needed and pleasureful release of the tensions that normally accumulate in healthy girls. Even so, she could not help but pick up some of the feelings of guilt that society hung on her forbidden act, and so Victoria had compromised in the past by very seldom relieving her frustration with her own fingers, only in times of the greatest sexual stress, or once in a while as a kind of reward for virtuous activity.
And that was the core of her worry today. Living with Penny made it almost impossible to think of anything but sex and Victoria had been resorting more and more frequently to her emotional pressure-release until her genitals were practically aching from the constant invasion of her thrusting fingers. Right or wrong, something told the confused young girl that this was an undesirable situation and she just didn't know what to do about it. On the one hand she could allow things to continue as they were, but her continual nervousness was already beginning to affect her schoolwork. Or she could take the plunge and let some eager young man seduce her. Even as this thought entered Victoria's young mind it was accompanied by a bolt of unreasoning fear, and she doubted that she would be able to go through with it. How did Penny and other girls like her do it? The young blonde wondered, and asked herself for the thousandth time if maybe there was something wrong with her that kept her from reacting naturally with boys.
With a bitter little chuckle, Victoria let herself think what a ridiculous turnabout had occurred in just one generation. When her mother had been her age it was assumed that all girls but a lost few were virgins when they married. But how different now! It was practically a badge of shame to still be a virgin at eighteen, almost like admitting to some kind of mental or physical defect. And the worst part was that something deep inside Victoria wanted so badly to be made love to, but couldn't find the right conditions to just let it happen. If society was going to change in this direction, the unhappy young girl thought bitterly, it had better develop some institutions to help out people like her who were only willing to take half-way steps. Perhaps there could be a ritual deflowering of young maidens followed by a State School of Fornication Arts. Anything would be better than being made to feel guilty about being a virgin and then punished by the scornful talk of the bragging young bucks who seduced you. The whole system now was so… haphazard, the grim-faced young girl thought to herself. Someday, for better or worse, it would happen to her and she hoped it would leave her with better feelings than some of the disillusioned girls she met. That was one of the truly outstanding things about Penny, Victoria mused. She was so absolutely, unreservedly, unguiltily involved in sex, with the same lack of self-consciousness of a puppy chasing a ball.
Since she had been walking with her gaze absentmindedly fixed on the ground in front of her, Victoria hadn't realized she was approaching Ben Wright and his dog Prince, who were standing together on the top of a small hill. The young blonde would have been amazed if she could have known the thoughts that were steaming and bubbling in her older male friend's mind. Ben had spotted the aimlessly strolling Victoria several minutes ago, and as she approached, the big hulking wreck of a man had kept up a running conversation with the politely listening dog, speaking in an overdone lecture-hall voice.
"Christ, Prince, God must be punishing me for some terrible sin I can't even remember. Something dark and horrible my mind has blotted from memory. Something worse than murder, or incest, or not paying my taxes. Why else would he have put me here in this beautiful place, surrounded by lovely little pussies that I'm forbidden to touch, tortured by constant unobtainable temptation?"
Prince looked up intently at his beloved master, not understanding his words, of course, but sensing he was being included in the man's deepest musings.
"Take that little doll that's coming up the path," Ben continued in a doleful tone. "Little Victoria, with those big blue eyes and that blonde hair and those fantastic tits. How is a man to keep his sanity while he's talking to her? I ask you, Prince," Ben said in mock gravity, continuing in the pompous tone of his old poetry-reading days, "what keeps me from ripping the clothes right off her and taking the precious jewel of her virginity for my own? And she must be a virgin. Any girl that nervous has to be a virgin, the signs of it stick out all over her. In my day, Prince, in my best days, I wouldn't have wasted a moment in liberating her libido." With a heavy hand, he reached down to pat the head of his faithful animal companion and the big dog responded by licking his master's palm.