Read Online A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page B

lovely breasts, large and firm, crisscrossed by light blue veins, and the nipples miniature red puffs newly wrinkled. Joe stroked her cool breasts gently, thoughtfully; he was happily aware of her sensual response, but he was sensitive at the same time to a reluctance in that very response that might be welling out of fear. He felt both desire and restraint increasing in Anita and struggling for supremacy and he wondered which would triumph.
    After he had undressed, he kissed her breast again, and then linked a chain of light muzzlings around her. She smiled sleepily and he was glad, feeling you had to keep your sense of humor to enjoy sex; humorless, it could drag you, slow you up.
    “Joe…” she whispered. “No more.”
    “You’re very pretty, Anita. Very lovely.”
    “Do you like my breasts?”
    “Very much.”
    “I like it when you kiss them. It makes me feel…funny. I don’t know. Funny and good.”
    “I like to kiss them.”
    “Do it some more.”
    He complied, and as he did so he hurried a hand beneath the folds of her skirt, touching the inevitable roughness of a knee and passing upward to the incredibly fantastic softness of a thigh. She gasped.
    Now came the really critical part, for Joe to undress her.
    He unhooked and unbelted her skirt and he took it off, his eyes dwelling on the dimly discernible wonder of her beautifully slender legs. He paused for a moment, and then he kissed her belly and thighs. She again quivered and again Joe felt from the girl the same contradictory pairing of passion and fear. Now she was nude and utterly defenseless; and, before he could touch her, her fear moved to the foreground and made her body rigid with shame. Joe understood, and became motionless.
    “You can go home now,” he said. “If you want to. We don’t have to go through with it, not now, not if you’re afraid of it. We can make it some other time, there’s lots of time, you can go home now and rest and relax and think about it and then you can come back tomorrow or the next day or not at all, whatever way you want it. But we don’t have to make it now, not when you’re afraid.”
    Her eyes opened.
    She looked at him, at his nakedness, and her eyes held neither shame nor fear. Then she stared down at herself, at her own nakedness, and she smiled a soft and personal smile.
    “I want to, Joe.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I want to,” Anita said. “Of course I’m scared, any girl would be, it’s natural, I can’t help it. But I want to make love, I want to—even if I can’t get as excited as I’d like to. I want to, I want you to do it to me, please do it, please—”
    Joe touched her breasts, then, sleeping things awakening the instant he found them; and his hand trailed to find the softest warmth of her, bringing her to an apex of life.
    Like creatures in the oldest of dreams, they moved bodies toward one another, and they flowed together into one, the girl’s pain at first so agonizing that Joe himself ached from it, his head spinning, his eyes balls of lead. But gradually pain subsided and silken, throbbing pleasure claimed her so magically that, when Anita opened her eyes momentarily to scan the great power of her lover, she could have sworn the charcoal gray of the room had become quilted with rosy fire.
     
     
       Roaches scurried across the wooden floor, ignoring two warm bodies locked in sorcery and sweetness but not quite love.
    Andy’s Castle, a cubbyhole bar on Houston Street, was close enough to the mainstream of the Village to be a meeting-place, and far enough away to escape the stream of tourists and Village habitués. A jukebox behind the bar blared the pop tunes of the day. If the place had an Andy, he failed to be in evidence. A woman barkeep, a blowsy female whose dyed red hair tumbled over burly shoulders, was drawing a stein of draft beer for a rheumy-eyed man.
    A boy in the booth at the back very nearly jumped when Shank pushed in through the heavy brown door. The boy