The Erection Set

Apparently it did. The bewilderment touched his mouth and he reached for his drink again. “But ... when you could have had a man ...”

“I have,” she said firmly, “but not in the primary circumstance. I have felt and tasted several men. There was great mutual enjoyment. Have I been explicit enough? There has even been penetration of another nature I found extremely satisfactory. So no, I am not a Lesbian, I am not frigid, I am not sexually abnormal. I am simply hanging on to an asset a man might consider quite valuable someday.”

Raul finished the drink, found an empty spot on the end table beside him and put the glass down. “American women,” he said. “You are quite shocking.”

“At my age I can afford to be,” Sharon told him. She deliberately leaned forward, knowing he was able to see the full sweep of her breasts beneath her dress in the movement. The slippery feel of the fabric made her nipples thrust forward prominently. “Now, why don’t you practice your erection on someone more appreciative.”

Somehow he managed to contain his frustration and rose to bow in a continental manner. She took his fingers in a gentle handshake. “I feel sorry for you, Sharon Cass,” he said.

She smiled again, a flash of amusement in her eyes. “I feel sorry for you, Raul. You know what you are missing and there is no possible chance of getting it at all.”

“Not quite true, my dear.”

“Quite true, Raul. I would deball you before you could rape me. My thirty-two years have been very athletic and, like I said, I know all the tricks ... even those.”

His exit was graceful, she thought, for someone who had to revise all his thinking. Tonight he’d have some woman tucked under silken sheets next to him, wondering if somewhere along the primrose path he had lost his touch. His performance wouldn’t be up to par at all and tomorrow he’d begin to worry. So he’d try for her again and lose the battle again and the decline would begin. Like the gross income chart on S. C. Cable’s wall behind his desk.

“Would you really deball him?”

It was a funny voice, oddly scratchy with a strange accent she couldn’t quite place, a Brooklyn voice with the New Yorkese deliberately rubbed out. She half turned and looked at him, then smiled because he was out of place somehow and she couldn’t tell why either. She let all the reasons compute in her analytical mind and decided that he was too big in the shoulders and chest for one thing, and his hair too short for another. It was what they used to call a crew cut. His black suit was new, but molded from a different era, as if he were conscious of only one style and couldn’t care less for what the “in” crowd had adopted. He looks like an eagle, she thought.

Suddenly she was back in front of the mirror again. She felt the tiny blonde hairs rise on the backs of her forearms and a prickle go across her shoulders. It was like dropping into an abstract vortex of time and sound and colors she couldn’t understand at all. Her stomach muscles seemed to tighten until juices were being squeezed right out of her. Inside her mind a faraway voice said, “I have a funny, funny feeling.” And she answered back, “No. It’s silly and childish. It never will really happen.”

“Well?” he asked.

“It wouldn’t have been very difficult.”

“Your destruction of the boy was, a little more practical,” he said.

“I didn’t think there was an eavesdropper.”

“Hell, kid, I wouldn’t miss a scene like that for the world. I was envying his approach until you dropped him. You really mean all that stuff?”

A curious laugh escaped Sharon’s lips. “Yes. It was all true.”

“Even about being a virgin?”

“Does it sound odd?”

This time he grinned and shrugged, toasting her with his drink. “Sounds crazy, kid, but it’s your game.”

She wondered where he had found a beer in Walt Gentry’s supply. It was something Walt only brought in for his slumming parties. “What’s your game, Mr....”

“Kelly. My first name’s a beaut. It’s D-O-G-E-R-O-N, but people call me Dog. I don’t take offense.”

But it did happen. It was too quick, too fast and she wasn’t prepare for it. It was the bomb blowing up in your face before you even had the time set for it. It was the world rocking to a standstill when a second before it was serene and placid. It was a chasm opening under your feet while you were walking up a beautiful path lined with flowers and happiness and the sense of accomplishment. Discipline and self-denial reacted before she was aware of it ... ages of fighting the battle of the sexes brought out the instinctive armor of words and demeanor. And always that little thought ... she could be wrong. The chances were that she was.