Read Online Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner - Free Book Online Page B

just a tiny bit. The room was very quiet; there were sounds from the other side of the wall but no crying. Maybe a radio was on.
    “Were you in a great deal of pain?” he asked.
    It took her a moment to realize that he was asking her about the operation.
    “I don’t remember,” she said. “The only thing I remember is the scar itching afterward. The whole thing, itching.” The plaster cast. She’d gotten some kind of rash from it.
    “Do you still have the scar?”
    “A little, I guess.”
    “Let me see it.”
    She was dumbfounded. At first she thought he must be joking, but then she saw that he was perfectly serious. She didn’t know what to do.
    “It’s just down my back.”
    He nodded. He was waiting.
    She was wearing a navy cotton shirtdress. (Katherine was trying to get her to wear brighter colors; Katherine said she dressed as though she were still going to Catholic school.) She could turn over and just pull it up from the bottom but somehow that image . . . of herself, with her back to him, pulling up her dress over her cotton pants and . . . she couldn’t do it that way. She would have to take off the dress. Or at least open it and partly take it off. She began undoing the buttons that ran the length of the front. Her cheeks were burning. She was excited. And ashamed. She looked down at the buttons as she undid them, squeezing them tightly to control the trembling of her hands. She ended up undoing all the buttons because she didn’t know what to do when she was finished. Finally she sat up and got her arms out of the sleeves, letting the dress fall in back of her, looking down to see what he saw. Pale, freckled skin. A plain white nylon bra. Katherine wore flowered bikini sets of lingerie. At that moment she wished—ached—to have had lingerie like Katherine’s. Without meaning to she looked up at him. And met his eyes, because he was watching her face, not her body. Quickly she turned over and lay face down on the bed, her face buried in her arms. In this position she felt her back again for the first time since she’d stretched out on the bed, but it wasn’t unbearable, just a dull ache. She was holding her breath; she forced herself to exhale slowly.
    He undid her brassiere although it wasn’t necessary to see the scar, which began some inches below it. With one finger he began at the top of the scar and traced a line down it; when he got to her underpants he slowly pulled them down over her buttocks, reaching around her front when necessary to get them down. Then he went back to the beginning of the scar and traced slowly down again all the way. Then he touched the half-moon.
    “What’s this?”
    “It’s from the same operation.”
    He leaned over her and kissed the half-moon, then the long scar, from the bottom to the top. Fondling her buttocks, her back,her shoulders. She wanted desperately to turn over and embrace him but she knew he didn’t want her to do this. Now he was doing something else—getting undressed?—she dared not turn to look for fear of displeasing him, and now he was climbing over her, straddling her, half-sitting on her, but without pressure. He wasn’t wearing his pants. He was leaning over her, kissing her—Oh, God, Martin, let me turn over, it’s hurting me! He was holding her buttocks now, raising them; if she arched her back it didn’t hurt as much but that was difficult. Now he was rubbing his penis between her legs, feeling for her opening, and then he was pushing into her, hurting her because she was dry and tight, slowly pushing in anyway until he was all the way in. Hurting. Feeling as though he were piercing some solid wall deep inside—maybe he would come right through her! Just when she thought she would scream out because the pain was unbearable, it lessened, and pleasure began to mingle with it, and then the pain inside disappeared and as the pleasure increased she forgot about her back and it got so good that it was hard not to moan, but