Dave Id

Tough-To-Tame

Chapter 1

Nan Mikell shook out the full length of her glowing auburn hair until the tips, hanging far out over the sparkling blue pool, dipped lightly in the water. Her brown, firm-fleshed arm lazily went over the edge of the pool and followed it; she watched the prismatic effect of the water bend her arm, immersed up to the forearm, at an acute angle. She saw the scarlet-tipped fingers of her hand waving gently at her under the water.

Nan rolled over on the cushion. The water of the pool was icy cold; the air was warm and humid. The effect of the two temperatures on her skin was sensual in the extreme. And the Florida sun beat down body, leaving a fine film of silvery sweat over her aroused body. For she was aroused, after all. No use trying to hide that from herself. She had been lying here in the sun on the deck of the big Bal Harbour house for an hour now, and her reverie had passed from her body-slim and brown in its fashionably Palm Beach string bikini, too daring for wear among any but the most intimate of friends-to the mornings calls, to the appointment book (with its dreary succession of charities and obligatory appearances), back to her body again.

And a fine body it is, too, she thought-the Hard masculine practicality of her thoroughly divided mind asserting itself again. Thinking of it, she closed her eyes and, lying back on the cushion, she ran the fingers of one soft brown hand down the silky skin of her flank, naked all the way down except for the soft string that held the shamelessly tiny piece of cloth over her crotch. Little goose bumps broke out along the length of her nude thigh as the fingers touched, caressed, stirred the tiny sub-bleached golden hairs on her leg. Still, not wanting to rush her little game to its conclusion, she kept up the soft caresses, barely touching herself. It was a game, after all-a game she played with herself.

A game she played with herself daily now, whenever the schedule showed a break, whenever she had an hour or so alone to herself in the big house, with its decked pool cantilevered out over the carport and the lush garden below. These early afternoons had come to be almost the only thing she liked about the echoing emptiness of the house: the warm air and the delicious feeling of aloneness…and the accompanying fantasy-rich and opulent and exotically un-Florida, un-stodgy Bal Harbour-that accompanied it all.

The fantasy had already begun in her mind. It varied, daily, with the different impressions that she had absorbed in the morning. Always there was the same delicately handsome young body, tanned and muscled, the same masculine, but ever so gentle, hands on her eagerly receptive skin, the same soft lips covering her with hot, insistent kisses, building her excitement up ever so slowly to a frenzy of passion, again, again…and then bringing her back down slowly from the heights, slowly and carefully, wary of breaking the magic spell that lay upon her as she lay back and absorbed it all with a delicious passivity that required nothing of her but that she respond.

The face…the face changed daily. It was now the face of a fresh, unspoiled beach boy she'd spotted coming out of the surf, some yards down from the limits of her private beach. Another time it might be a bronzed young faun she'd run into, coming out of a Miami Beach bar a week before. It was always a face that had made an impression of…what? Innocent, puckish sensuality? The abandon of adolescence half-corrupted? It didn't matter. It was the impression made that mattered. No. The face could fade. It was the strong and smooth young body, the thing that did not change, that mattered. It was the gently insistent hands. Most of all, it was the questing, soft, infinitely tender lips, touching her here and there…

She shivered and arched her back to let one of her own brown hands reach behind her back and slip the string of her tiny bra loose. As she did, a stray wisp of cool breeze broke through the dampness of the Florida air, slipped inside her bra, caressed the unseen dark nipples of her little breasts so that they sprang to a delicious stiffness, still under the barely-confining cloth.

Her eyes remained closed. That was part of the game. The lover would remain an imagined lover. The caresses, the kisses would fall in silence upon her, unseen. And soon the reality of her own two hands, miming his, would be joined by a kissing mouth, touching here and there on her body, coming hotly to rest at last in a wild crescendo of excitement: that part was where her dreams, her fantasies, took over. And the ecstatic uplift of it all-the "high," as her daughter Monica had called it once-was enough. It was enough to blot out the dreariness of her world. The loneliness of it. The emptiness.

Nan Mikell hadn't had a man in nearly a year now.

What matter? she thought, driving the last shred of self-doubt out of her mind now, letting the fantasy have free rein…

…He wouldn't speak. She would hear nothing of him, there in the darkness behind her closed eyelids, except that infinitely expressive language of breath that he spoke so well. Soft breath on her cheeks, her eyelids, her ears, as one by one he kissed them reverently, like a sultan counting his jewels. Warm, deep breath as he bent deeply over her, kissing her neck, drawing a little line of soft-lipped kisses down her body from there to…yes, now he was pulling the soft cloth away from her breasts, baring them to the sun, to the gentle, strangely cool breeze, and his kisses went…

Ahhhh! There was a morning's growth of boy-beard on his face: as he kissed the tip of one nipple the soft-hard bristles touched her sensitive areola delicately; the goose bumps rose on the erectile flesh of the dark ring. Her nipple grew long and painfully sensitive; as attuned to her arousal as if the flesh kissed had been his own, he began now, softly at first, then with a growing abandon, to suck on it She gasped-just once-as he took the hardened, fingertip-sized end of it into his mouth, rolling his rough tongue around the sides of it, gently nipping with sharp, white, boy's teeth all over. She groaned with pleasure.

And now his lips left the nipple, dove hungrily on the other. And as he repeated the delicious formula on the second breast, she felt, to her intense satisfaction, his hands start in on the first: tweaking it, nipping with sharp little fingernails, tracing the line around her areolas, rolling the aroused nipple between her fingers…It was so good!

Now, feeling the first twinges of a passion long smothered by her loneliness and inhibitions, Nan Mikell, her own brown fingers rubbing her breasts, spread her legs to the sun, curling her red-tipped toes in abandon. And, surreptitiously, one eager hand stole gently down her side, touching nude and suddenly alive flesh every inch of the way, to toy with, and eventually loose, the simple bow tie that held the bottom of her bikini to her body. And, pulling softly, liberated the rest of her eagerly straining body to sun, soft ocean air, and the imagined kisses of her fantasy lover.

As if in response to her wish, a wisp of cool breeze swept across her suddenly naked skin. A spasm of shivering swept over her; she bit her Up and arched her long and slender neck in a delicious motion, giving herself up to it all--

There in her self-imposed darkness, she went deliriously limp as the brown hands lifted her legs to the sky, caressing them all the way from the delicately painted toes and the soft, unscarred soles, down the slim ankles and swelling calves, to the unmarred tenderness of the insides of her brown and satiny thighs, opening her wide, wide…

And that was the curious part When, if ever, she came to think about these golden moments afterward, as the reverie took over, the strangeness of it always struck her. She invariably imagined him naked and shamelessly male during all this, and as aroused as she was. She knew if she opened her eyes-that wasn't part of the game, but she could imagine it-she would see between his own hard thighs the thick and engorged emblem of his manhood: a stout and straining, uncircumcised, red-tipped penis of heroic dimensions, surmounting heavy balls pulled tight by his arousal against his body, the whole coming fiercely up at her out of a jet-black forest of wildly curling hair-an exciting, arousing, breathless-making sight But…

But he'd make no move to put it inside her. It wasn't his arousal that mattered. It was hers. And hers could only be dealt with satisfactorily by what happened next And what happened next was a beautiful and secret thing that no man had ever done to her, that she'd never had the nerve to ask a man to do to her. And although, as she lay back to enjoy it all, she might think of the big and straining penis, its trembling head aquiver with passion, its sweetly delicate eye pulsing forth with a single silvery drop of delicious-looking dew as it all but visibly yearned for her. She might even long-shamelessly!-to touch and caress it, even (she shuddered now, thinking of it, shaken by the thought) kiss it tenderly and lick the tiny drop of sperm from the end of it; but this had no part in the fantasy. She might think about it-fleetingly-but no more. More important was to give herself up, completely, to the secret ritual they shared. More important was to spread her thighs wide, straining to hold herself open for him, as his lips invaded the secret places of her body. His lips; his fingers; his questing, darting tongue…

Ahhhhh! she groaned in something near pain, as the brown mouth dived hungrily into her auburn-haired crotch, the lips and teeth burying themselves in the soft, wet inner lips of her vulva, his tongue going like mad on the infinitely sensitive flesh of the insides of her. She was wet! So wet! It was his task to lick her dry, dry as a bone!.

But now a new sensation entered: the beard she'd felt before. Raking inside of her, hurting her-and then, as quickly, turning the hurt to ecstasy as the soft tongue swept over the places the ungentle bristles had scraped raw. The lips closing in a dozen soft kisses over the aroused flesh, taking mouthfuls of its softness inside himself. The tongue expelling it and licking it, licking it clean, again and again…

Oh my God, she thought. He's licking me. He's eating me. He's sucking my c…But she couldn't say it Not even in her mind, not even in her heart of hearts. She could only enjoy it with a wordless, mindless passion that grew and grew, slowly (she'd always been so slow! It had made Ed so unhappy! But she couldn't help it. Could she? Could she?), building to a climax she could hardly imagine even now.

Once she had sat before a mirror on the massage table. And she'd spread her legs and looked at herself, long and hard, fascinated with what she saw. Her own wide-open c…But she couldn't say the word, even think about it The curling hair growing lush around it; the pink hairless flesh inside; the little red button above it; the brown button of her anus. Was this what the men wanted? she'd thought to herself. And she'd looked at it wondering. It had seemed so strange-looking. And yet…there was a certain beauty about it after all, now. It was all in the way you looked at it

And this young man with her now: he must be looking at it with love, with affection, with a hungry passion. For he was diving noisily into it, his breath coming in great gasps, his busy tongue driving her crazy with eager anticipation of what was to come, any minute now, any minute…

When it came she screamed.

She couldn't help it His whole mouth opened and took the upper third of her vagina into it sucking the upper end of her cleft deep inside him, and, best of all, taking, at last between his soft and voracious lips, the hard, upstanding head of her little button! She kicked wildly; her anus winked open, shut open, shut with an uncontrollable motion of its own; the wetness gushed forth from the soft tissues inside her again; but nothing deterred him. His firm hands holding her spread as wide as she could go. He began, slowly, with a steady rhythm, to suck on the little shaft, taking it in and out of his mouth, in and out, in and out On every fourth, in-and-out motion, his tongue would sweep up the bottom of it in a delicious lick. Then he started varying the rhythm. Every third suck. Then every fifth. Then, once, he went ten sucks without licking her, and she was dying for it when it finally came. She almost fainted when it did…A door slammed.

"Mrs. Mikell, I'm finished I just wanted…"

Nan Mikell, her face red as a beet sprang to her feet. And in the trembling anger that beset her she didn't think to cover herself up at first. Her features, delicately beautiful as a Renaissance Madonna's in repose, were black with rage, contorted like a harpy's. She stood, hands on hips, looking at the intruder, mastering the dark force of hatred in her that contended with her reason as she stared hot-eyed at the playsuit-clad young girl from the University who had come to catalogue Ed's books prior to the official takeover of his library. The girl's face was scarlet with embarrassment; her hand had gone to her mouth and stayed there, and her face held-frozen, as in a stop-motion photograph-a look of horror.

But her eyes, looking at Nan Mikell out of her silent tableau of mortification, strayed once, hotly, to Nan's nude body: to the darkly aroused nipples, to the fiercely tangled bush at the bottom of her belly, to the thin line of hot juice that stained Her bare and goose-pimpled leg.

Then, her eyes clouding over with tears, she came apart. "Oh, Mrs. Mikell, I…I thought you were--"

"Get out!" Nan Mikell said in a deadly voice. And, with an indignant motion, she reached for the robe in the pool-side chair and held it protectively to her body while the young woman, flustered, turned and headed brokenly for the door. Then, still breathing hard, she sat down on a nearby chaise and pulled the robe close about her body.

She'd been seen! Doing it!

By another woman!

And, most strangely of all, she'd liked it!

She'd liked the feel of those strange eyes on Her naked body. She'd felt deliciously, shamelessly nude in front of the girl-and proud of it! And, best of all, she'd enjoyed having the girl see her not only naked, but trembling with passion, with the wetness of her flowing down her thighs!

She'd enjoyed it! Worse-she'd had an almost irresistible impulse to flaunt it! To reach down and grab a handful of hair and bump it up at her! To put both hands down there between her legs, and…and open herself up for the girl! Looking her hard in the eye the whole time!

Shuddering, Nan Mikell pulled the robe even more closely around her. All of a sudden there was a strange chill in the air.

Chapter 2

Nan had been very much Ed Mikell's woman for the sixteen years they were married. She'd come to him-well, not quite a virgin, perhaps, but not quite experienced either. She'd been raised small-town Catholic, poor and strait-laced, and only her bright and agile mind and the striking beauty that accompanied it had shown any sign of raising her out of the Polish, steel-town ghetto in which she'd been born.

That same beauty, however, had been a two-edged sword. It won her attention-and then her mind had won her the scholarship to Bryn Mawr that had made her bid farewell to Pigiron City. But it had also severely restricted her sexual education. Her brothers, tough street-fighters, quick to protect her good name, had at the same time protected her from anyone who might have wished to further her education in this line. One boy did-Johnny Bobrowicz; she'd never forget him-and her brother Stash had broken his arm for him, to the tune of an obscene Polish tirade that could be heard all the way to the end of the street She hadn't had the nerve to go back to school for two days after that And after that her dates ended promptly at ten o'clock. She'd thought things would change, away at school. She'd even changed her name, a little anyhow, thinking that what plain Anna Karpowa wouldn't do, Nan might. (She hadn't had the nerve to do anything about that plonky Polack last name; her family'd never speak to her again.) But keeping up with her grades had come much harder back East, in the Quaker country. There were always so many distractions. And it had taken all her nerve and Polish stubbornness to get her all the way through to her degree-and then Ed had come into her life.

She'd never expected to marry millions. She'd raised her hopes, perhaps, to the point where she'd meet a man with a bright future, and she'd help him along, and they'd be in six figures, perhaps, at the end of his career. And that in itself was an audacious dream for a steel-town girl to have. She'd have settled for much less.

But she never had a chance. Ed had met her on her first job, a fresh-out-of-school summertime thing she'd taken at a suburban Philadelphia TV station. She'd been at work writing the evening news report-it consisted of retyping and cueing a series of clips from the UPI wire-when Ed had blundered in looking for Mr. Hovis, manager of the station. He hadn't found him, Ed always said later. But he'd found something much more to his liking.

It'd been a whirlwind courtship, and their honeymoon had taken them to places she'd dreamed of, but had never imagined herself visiting: Monte Carlo, Ibiza, Mallorca. And in each of these places Ed had friends, and old girl friends, and social and business contacts waiting for him. She'd always felt as if she were going along as part of the furniture. This world was Ed's: the world of the house in Norristown and the house in Bal Harbour and the house in Palma and the house in…well, simply everywhere. There'd been a place open for him on the Main Line, but Philadelphia bored him. He'd bounced back and forth between divorced parents all during his childhood; he was a cosmopolite at twelve, he'd told her, with so many stickers on his luggage that the leather could only be seen at the handles.

But it was all Ed's. As she was Ed's. Her life was arranged by Ed's schedule, and that had much to do with the schedule of the Eastern Petroleum Company's conglomerate interests. You went to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time because so-and-so would be there, and getting a chance to talk to so-and-so in a social, just-friends context was worth a single firm's annual payroll. And if you were Ed Mikell, you took your wife with you.

Thus she'd lived all those years on the road. And it had been a natural thing, in the kind of circles that Ed traveled in, to put your only daughter, when she came, under the care of a nanny from the first, and then send her off to boarding school as soon as it was decently possible. Nan had had Mickey, and had loved her from the first. But Ed's schedule had taken her away from the child almost immediately. Now they hardly knew each other.

And when Ed had died…Nan had quietly come apart. And then she'd just as quietly, with all her stolid Polish stubbornness to draw on, put herself back together again, called the bankers in, reorganized the business, and taken over as much of Ed's complex schedule of activities as she could handle. He'd been chairman of this, honorary vice-president of that Very well, she took over these functions as a dead politician's wife might while the limelight lasted. Weekly they brought her checks to sign; daily her private secretary went over her schedule with her and told her about this flower show, that museum dedication, the varied activities she was expected to grace with her presence.

And it was all still Ed's. Nothing was hers.

Not even fifteen-year-old Mickey was hers. The two met several times a year at school vacations; they had little to say to each other. Mickey clearly thought Nan was some sort of wind-up Barbie doll her father had bought Nan secretly thought Mickey a terrible little prig, and wondered if she weren't hanging around with the wrong crowd of people off there at school, or away on those summer-camp excursions.

This had gone on for something like two years now, since Ed's sudden death. She'd attend religiously to the functions people expected her to attend to, and then retire to whichever house the schedule required her to occupy during that season: to read, to exercise (for some reason, the upkeep on Her still beautiful body was important to her), to watch television, to…solitary pursuits.

It hadn't always been this way. She'd tried to accept some of the masculine sympathy she'd been offered in the months that had followed Ed's passing. But the choices a woman had at the top weren't much better than the ones she had at the bottom. The men were rich drunks, sexually inadequate even for a normal woman, much less for a woman whose responses (Ed had said, ever so gently, one time) were slower than most. Or they were climbers, cozying up to her with little thought in mind but her money. She'd had a handful of experiences with either kind, and quietly wished she were either back in Pigiron City, where the wives cried out in abandon, deep into the night, as their lusty husbands, poor but virile, plowed them to sleep, or out in that hazy, middle land she'd never known-and where, she quietly suspected, the action really was.

And in the end, she'd sent all her suitors packing. She wanted no part of them. She wanted…well, what did she want?

"What do I want?" she said one morning. And, sitting up in bed with her breakfast, she suddenly pushed the tray away. She started to ring the bell for Beatrice to come and take it away, but something made her stop. And, hugging her knees under the light sheet, she let her mind run.

A day or so before she'd had that embarrassing-and profoundly shocking-experience with the young cataloguer from the library. She hadn't forgotten it. She had been deeply disturbed by the clear implications of it. She was getting…well, sex-starved. And that wasn't so bad in itself. That was curable. But…

But she'd clearly felt herself attracted to the girl. To a girl! And she'd openly flaunted her nakedness at the young woman-gloried in it Was something wrong with her? Was she going off the deep end? Turning…lesbian?

But no; that was impossible. She was as normal as blueberry pie. She probably needed a man. She needed, well, perhaps a change of scenery. Or a change of friends. Or…

Friends? She hadn't any friends. What she had, after all these years, was Ed's friends. There wasn't a soul left in the world that she could talk to. Except…

But of course!

Wouldn't it be nice to see some of the girls from school again? Mary Alice Carpenter, for example? Her old roommate and confidante?

Nan scampered out of bed, wearing only her shortie nightgown, and went to the bureau for notepaper. She'd write Mary Alice today, right away. Her address would be in the Class Reunion brochure that came last month. And she'd figure out a way for the two of them to get together to talk over old times, old boyfriends, Hoop Day at Bryn Mawr, all the old jokes. They'd have a fine time. And maybe Mary Alice (who had always seemed so sexually secure, so sure of herself) could put her back on the right track. And so thinking, she plopped her bare fanny down on the cold leather seat and began writing.

But it wasn't so good that night. And the self-doubts, the fears, all of it came roaring back. And Nan Mikell went to the bar four times, mixing herself a more deadly double Martini each time, until her head reeled from the sudden ingestion of that much alcohol. It was a hot night, and that didn't help much either. She put the last drink down, kicked her shoes off, and sauntered across the room. At the glass doors she stopped, switched on the underwater lights of the pool, and considered. A cold dip would clear her head. And she reached for her zipper.

Then she stopped again.

She knew what she would do.

And she pulled die side zipper of her dress down, all right, and stepped naked out of it And, still nude, one hand lightly running down her bare body, she went to the bedroom wardrobe for robe and sandals. Stepping into the light robe, slipping the thongs of her beach shoes between her toes, she thought angrily of the loneliness of the past year. And she shook out the dark mass of her auburn hair, letting it spill in abandon down her back as she strode purposefully to the deck, heading for the concrete stairs that led to the tunnel beneath the road to the beach.

The tunnel was dark, but there was an almost-full moon out that night and, once inside it, she could see ahead of her the light glimmering on the water-a full moon, or nearly so; no cover of darkness. Yet…the four doubles were working on her brain, making her giddy, reckless. What if? What if she? Well, why not?

And, stopping near the opening on the house side, with the whole length of the tunnel to cross and the whole width of the beach to traverse, she stepped out of her sandals, slowly undid the robe, and laid it carefully over the hand rail. And she walked, nude-the cool beach air coming in from offshore, to caress her sensitive skin-the length of the dark tunnel

As she walked, feeling the breeze, feeling the rough kiss of the beach grit under Her soles, a reckless and sensual scenario of lust was running swiftly through her mind, fed by the too-sudden spree of drinking, fed by the sultry night and the cool kiss of the breeze on her body, fed, most of all, by the mad dreams that had been keeping her in an almost constant state of arousal for weeks now. She was thinking: I'm naked, and unprotected, and vulnerable. There will be moonlight on my body on the beach. Anyone who wanders by can see all I've got. I will hide nothing. I will go to the water and swim. And I will not cover myself with my hands, or shrink away, if I am approached. And I will give myself, fully and completely, to the first person I meet on the beach, tonight, in the moonlight

The thought was daring; more so than any she'd ever allowed herself. And yet it was something she so desperately wanted to do that nothing in the world could have kept her from it. Abandon! Let yourself go! All the way! No inhibitions!

And then, inexorably, the thought crept in: To anyone? To the first person she met on the beach? Male…or female?

And the defiant demon inside of her said, Yes! Yes!

Crossing the deserted beach, so bare, so open to chance, was a strange experience. After all, her-robe-her entire covering, any protection she might have-all these were far behind her now. There was no one to whom she could call for help should she require it Yet…there was a strange feeling of power coursing through her limbs now, as she walked-she forced herself not to run, forced herself to a leisurely pace, to draw it all out-slowly across the sand. It was an oddly new feeling, and she wasn't sure what she thought of it all. And only when the cold surf sloshed excitingly around her ankles did she allow herself to look around.

The moonlight was a delicious color. The beach was bathed in an odd blue light that carried far down the sand; she could see people splashing in the surf far down the strand-just outlines, dark against the reflection of the moon on the sand. A thrill of some new and delightful kind went through her as she realized that they had only to come closer to catch her in the altogether, to… But then an even odder sensation blotted this out

Someone was out there, watching her. Nearby. Someone standing in the shadow of the seawall.

She couldn't make out the figure. All she could see for sure was the light of a glowing cigarette-tip, there in the pitch-black shadows. But even if the cigarette hadn't been there, she fancied she could have told whether someone was there or not. There was an aura of…presence there.

Someone was staring at her. Slowly, insultingly, unhurriedly.

At the thought a sudden chill ran through her.

And a strange thing happened. Perhaps it was the giddiness that the drinks had brought on; she wasn't accustomed to that much alcohol in that short a time. Perhaps it was the odd mood of carefree recklessness, the eerie atmosphere of dream-like reverie, that had overtaken her when she first made up her mind to go naked to the beach. But it seemed, now, that the sounds of the crashing surf died, and the distant yells of the night bathers, far down the beach, went away, and there was no one there, in this strange moment of suspended time, but the two of them alone: she, naked and defenseless in the bright light of the waxing moon; the stranger, anonymous, clothed in darkness, watching her, smoking lazily in the deep shadow.

And the voice said: "You're beautiful."

It was a husky voice, halfway between a man's and a woman's: a deep, throaty, alto sort of voice.

It paused; she saw the unseen watcher take another puff on the glowing cigarette.

"Who's there?" Nan Mikell said, crossing her arms over her little breasts.

"Don't rush things," said the voice. "I want to look at you. You're quite lovely, you know. Don't cover your breasts. I want to see them. I want to look you over, slowly and carefully, before I make love to you."