26 Nights

by 26 Nights (Memoirs of a Contemporary Gentleman) [MF] (retail) (epub)

  Nancy, I thought. It had been only recently that that uninhibited, redheaded creature—Nancy Nympho, her husband had called her—had been with me in this manner in the middle of her living room, with that very husband looking on, and her houseboy waiting in the wings. I held on to her breasts and listened to her panting and moaning and gasping as her body moved up and down, and I remembered how she had—

  “Oh Steven …” Phyllis moaned. “Oh god, Steven yes … Oh, it’s wonderful …”

  I opened my eyes. It was Phyllis, all right. Her face was flushed and twisted with passion, her hair was disheveled, her gorgeous breasts were bouncing. She looked fantastically sexy, and she felt even better. She was one thoroughly exciting woman, and I was happy to be with her … in spite of Miss Greenglass’s niggling reservations, which …

  Damn.

  “Yes, Steven, oh God yes … so good … oh, darling …”

  I closed my eyes again. Who had said that? Oh yes. I remembered. Christine. The sweet, almost virginal eighteen-year-old blonde whose long-standing crush on me had been consummated in my office—on Miss Greenglass’s desk, in fact. “Oh, darling, darling …” she had gasped, her hands rubbing my back and her pneumatic buttocks slapping rhythmically on the hard surface as she twisted beneath me. “Oh harder, Steven … yes, darling … now … oh God, I love it, Steven, yes …”

  Fired by that recollection, I reared up and rolled Phyllis onto her back, breaking our contact only momentarily before coming down on top of her. This was how it had been with Christine, except that instead of the soft bed it had been the hard wooden surface of the desk underneath our pumping bodies …

  Which now brought to mind a more recent encounter on another wooden surface—the lovely Chinese lady, Li Mai, on the little table in the storage room in the back of her restaurant. Li Mai’s exclamations had tended to be more graphic than Christine’s, the stark English obscenities sounding strangely arousing in her clipped accent. And her long legs twined around my waist, clutching at me, pulling me deeper inside her … her fine supple body arching and thrusting with a strength that belied her delicate slenderness …

  Phyllis was whimpering now as I thrust steadily and strongly into her, pleasuring both her and myself while driven by these visions of her predecessors. Interestingly, her whimpers sounded just like those her cousin Irene had emitted as I had plunged into her from behind while gazing out at Manhattan from the very top of the Statue of Liberty. That view was less memorable for me than the view up Irene’s dress as we climbed the steep spiral stairs. And the feel of her fine round buttocks twisting against me, and her fine round breasts under my hands. And those high-pitched mewling sounds that were now being replicated, as it seemed, in my ear …

  The whimpers turned to groans, and then to hoarse, gasping shrieks as Phyllis shuddered into her first explosion of the evening. Her climactic cries were different from Irene’s, however. They were more like … like Betty, the voluptuous vixen who had been a near-fatal mistake in terms of my wager, but with whom I had eaten the sexiest take-out meal I’d ever had … among other things …

  That memory kept me hard and ready while Phyllis recovered from her orgasm, moaning and catching her breath. With Phyllis it never took very long, however, and in a few moments she was up on all fours, eager for me to take her from behind. I complied with dispatch, and by now the memories came easily. I thought of Betty’s friend Edna, crouching before me with her buttocks in the air and her dark head clasped between Betty’s thighs. I thought of Fern Forrester, the TV lady, rubbing my sperm into her body while envisioning her vast male audience watching her as she did so. And I thought of Abigail, in the little dressing room at Brooks Brothers, half appalled and half delighted at her own youthful passion as she attempted to stifle her cries against my mouth …

  These images, and others, ran through my mind almost unbidden now, as I held on to Phyllis’s twisting, rocking, bucking body; and this time, when she came again, I exploded along with her.

  Breathless, we collapsed side by side on the bed. I knew, however, that there was still a long night ahead of us. But I wasn’t worried. Fortunately there had been, as Miss Greenglass had said, an abundance of women in my past. I was sure my memories would see me through.

  It was with a certain sense of déjá vu that I picked up the bedside telephone next morning to receive Miss Greenglass’s accustomed call informing me of her arrival at the office downstairs.

  “I’ll be down in a while, Miss Greenglass,” I told her. “I am somewhat engaged just now.”

  “With Mrs. Dilsey, I presume,” Miss Greenglass said, rather coolly.

  “Of course,” I said. “Incidentally, Miss Greenglass, do you realize that on the day we first made our little … ah … agreement, I had—”

  “Yes, I do recall, Mr. Walling,” Miss Greenglass said, interrupting me with unaccustomed asperity. “I recall that very well. And I take it that this—this repeat performance, shall we say, has caused you no qualms of conscience whatsoever, as far as that agreement is concerned.”

  “Qualms?” I said innocently. “I’ve broken no rules, Miss Greenglass; I’ve violated no stipulations. Why in the world would I have qualms?”

  There are some things even Miss Greenglass doesn’t have to know.

  Chapter 17

  IF I HADN’T SPENT MY ENTIRE LIFE LEARNING TO keep idle emotion from rendering me as helpless in a man’s world as … well, as most other women I know, I might have begun to panic by now. Even so, there is a certain far-off prickling sensation gnawing at my hard-won composure that is both annoying and, I will admit in confidence, intriguing to me. Despite myself, I look forward now to the moment when my employer appears at my elbow to retail the stories of his sexual conquests. There was a time when his breath on the back of my neck caused only a shiver of disdain. Increasingly these days it brings a frisson of pleasure which I can hide from him only with difficulty. And yet I am determined to hide it. As I am determined to win the wager into which I so foolishly entered.

  Anne Greenglass (you would be saying to yourself if you knew me well enough to use my first name), how could a sensible young woman like you be so foolish as to involve yourself in a bet with a man like Steven Walling? Not that it matters now, the deed being done (and I pride myself on not dwelling in the past), but I did it for the oldest of reasons, the mercenary one. I knew my employer’s propensities before I came to work for him, and only accepted the position because the salary offered was so generous. My eyes were also open to the fact that Mr. Walling was interested in more than my office skills, but I felt competent to keep our relationship entirely on a business basis. And so I did during the first six months of my employment.

  Then came the wager. At that time I hadn’t begun keeping the records of our conversations, which will be so valuable to me in describing this strange progress, so I am unable to give you a word-for-word account of how it came about. I fear, though, that I was quite as responsible as he. Appalling as I would like to say I found his bed-hopping, I admit to a certain fascination at how easy and pleasant he made it all sound. My life had not been especially easy or pleasant, and I suppose like many people, I find a fascination with the lives of those who have everything they could want. That must be it.

  Not that Mr. Walling is an unattractive man. On the contrary. And though I hate to admit it, his charm is genuine. So too, I think, is his delight in the multitude of women he beds with such maniacal regularity. But that isn’t what brought me low. No, the idea of such endless repetition of the pneumatic function of sex fills me only with indifference.

  It was more curiosity, together with my affection for order, which led me to suggest that he might organize his adventures by attempting to consummate relations with a series of women whose Christian names began with the letters of the alphabet, proceeding without deviation from A to Z. If only the conversation had ended there I wouldn’t be in my current predicament. But my employer has an unfortunate propensity for recasting all id
eas in sporting terms. Before I knew it he had offered to triple my salary if he failed to accomplish the feat in six months time. Now, as I have mentioned, my paycheck is already ample, and without a calculator it is possible to state with some precision that three times ample is very good indeed. That is why I consented to the wager.

  Only recently have I begun to seriously consider the consequences if I lose. If he succeeds in meeting the terms of the agreement, the forfeit is my person. That is, I will be his twenty-seventh conquest. At the time the bargain was struck it seemed to me that I had a great many advantages on my side. The task is, after all, a daunting one on the face of it, no matter how effective Mr. Walling’s powers of persuasion. And again, one stipulation of the bet is that he neither repeat his performance with any of his partners once he has achieved consummation, nor have relations with any other women during the six-month term of the wager. This, I felt sure, would be gall for a man who keeps two appointment books—one for business and one for pleasure. I might add that, although I have frequently been called upon to remind him where he left his business calendar, he has never to my knowledge misplaced his personal book. Most importantly, he is a notoriously lazy man. It is not self-flattery that leads me to say that his business benefits a great deal from my attention to it. My assumption (since proven woefully wrong) was that the entire episode would soon slip from his mind and that in six months I would be able to remind him of the incident and require the trebling of my pay in a single breath.

  Curiously, he seems remarkably single-minded in his pursuit of this seemingly trivial accomplishment, and this puzzles me. Although the amount of money involved would mean a great deal to me, he has often lost greater sums through an unwillingness to return a phone call early enough in the day.

  My apprehension was piqued from the beginning, as Steven advanced immediately and repeatedly. My native caution warned me to begin keeping records of his steps, and I will now rely on these, interjecting some explanation of my growing anxiety as required.

  I don’t feel old enough to find myself so often shaking my head at the fecklessness of youth these days, and yet I do. The seduction technique employed by Mr. Walling on this occasion was to take the young woman to lunch and explain to her the terms of the wager and how she could help his cause. Fascination at this bald approach seems to have won out over self-respect, and before her mother would have let her go in swimming after the meal, the two were misusing a dressing room at her place of employment. I will let his description of the events complete the tale:

  “The dressing rooms at Brooks Brothers are larger than those in many other establishments, but still not what you might call capacious. Fortunately the doors lock from the inside, and though for two people to lie on the floor, let alone conduct any strenuous activity there, might be somewhat impractical, the rooms are furnished with narrow wooden benches on which one may place one’s clothing. Abigail and I did not use ours for that purpose. We occupied the diminutive bench ourselves, I seated on the hard wood, with Abigail seated on me, with her back to me, bent slightly forward and clutching at my legs for support, with my arms around her, my hands covering her fine round breasts and my rampant cock deep inside her sweet, pulsing vagina.

  “In this position we could both see ourselves in the full-length mirror opposite the bench, and I must say that the sight of Abigail’s delectable body slowly rising and falling against me did nothing to diminish my ardor. Abigail enjoyed it too, and the first time she came I had to put my hand over her mouth to stifle her cry. By the second time she had turned around to face me and we were kissing passionately, so that the sound of her climax was muffled against my mouth. As was mine against hers.”

  I expect Steven wanted to embarrass me with the luxury of detail in his description. Could it have been intended to arouse me? The question persists in spite of my efforts to dismiss it. At any rate, Abigail not only lay down to be his first stepping-stone, she provided the second. Almost. Maybe it was my first stab of concern when he announced on the second day that he had already secured a second triumph that brought out my legalistic side. Let me explain.

  My conscience still pricks me over the disqualification of the friend proposed by Abigail. But not very much. After all, a given name may have any number of nicknames. For that matter, a woman named Theresa may be known to her friends as Bathsheba because she dated a man named David in college. My regret isn’t that I insisted on a rule which any child would acknowledge was implicit from the start, but that I betrayed anxiety at the fact that he had advanced so rapidly. And I gained very little thereby as, with equal alacrity, he dispatched of Belinda the social butterfly, whom he ran to earth in Monte Carlo. I gather she required no more wooing than Abigail had. His arrival seems to have been enough to put them both in the proper mood, as evidenced in this transcript of his report.

  “ ‘It’s so good to see you, Steven,’ she said. ‘But I’ve just managed to slip away for a moment. Even a hostess must go to the bathroom … but I can’t leave my guests for long.’

  “ ‘Then let’s not waste time,’ I replied, and pulled down my zipper.

  “ ‘You are so wicked!’ Belinda murmured. ‘But you’re right.’

  Lifting her dress, she reached beneath it to pull off her panties.

  “ ‘This will have to do,’ she said; then, ‘Oh, Steven!’ as I released my already stiff, but still growing, penis.’ ”

  Ah, romance.

  Steven Walling is a resourceful man. And, I must confess, in his own perverse way an honorable one. His tryst with Christine needs no more mention than the fact that it occurred. More notable was, as they say, the one who got away. Delirious, I dare say, with how easily he slipped in and out of Monte Carlo, not to mention his mayfly romance there, he very nearly consummated an affair on his return trip which any jury in the world would find disqualified him from our wager. That is, he found himself on the runway and taxiing, as it were, in an airplane lavatory with a flight attendant whose name turned out to be not Catherine but Katharine. Even I must admit to being impressed by his willpower in refusing the temptation of so willing a partner, and his honesty in confessing how close he came to failing. Perhaps he embellished the story a little, but I will repeat what I was told verbatim:

  “Katharine began to slide down my body, lowering herself slowly, letting her breasts rub against me all the way down, until she was on her knees … Oh dear Lord, I thought. Maybe … if there was no actual intercourse, would that really count? I tried desperately to convince myself that it wouldn’t. Her fingers opened my fly and found my erection and pulled it out, and her head bent to me, and …

  “ ‘No!’ And somehow I managed to turn away from her, putting my hands down to shield myself, using them to tuck myself back in and zip up.”

  Much to my amazement, perhaps even to his, this episode didn’t entirely disqualify him in the eyes of Katharine, as I will soon describe. Although he quickly made up lost time with Christine, this was as close as he had come thus far to a failure. His momentary flash of nobility, the feeling that at least I was matched with a genteel adversary, may have brought some color to my cheek. Briefly, it even seemed to me that I was actually feeling a touch of desire myself, but I have convinced myself otherwise.

  I share with my employer an aversion to most intense physical activities, and part of the reason is that they have a tendency to overexcite the emotions. It hardly seems to me just, then, on the part of Providence, to have placed him in the way of perhaps the most overexcited package of human hormones in the Western Hemisphere just at a time when her Christian name allowed him to take advantage of the fact. Yet that is what happened. He was actually in quest of a woman named Deborah when he was overcome by this human steamroller. The seduction was much more her doing than his, he only pausing long enough to discover the convenience of her initial. Apparently winning a match invariably drove her into a sexual frenzy which she would cheerfully mitigate with the help of the nearest man. In this case, Steven Wa
lling was that man:

  “We were both panting when we broke apart. ‘Is so good when I win,’ she breathed. ‘I am not care, me. We do big fuck, yes? Now, yes?’

  “ ‘It does look that way,’ I said, and grabbed her again. I meant to pull her down to the tiled floor, but she backed up against the wall, out of the direct spray of the shower, taking me with her. With her arms tight around my neck, she raised her legs and wrapped them around me, as though trying to climb up my body. I clutched at her tight buttocks, helping her, lifting her up, until I was able to join our bodies, and she sank down over my stiffness with a shout of joy, those marvelous legs squeezing me harder than ever.”

  I must say, Steven leaned unnecessarily close and spoke in a very low voice while dispensing these details, and it is possible that I haven’t gotten every word right. Just possible.

  There are times when my opponent’s moves forward, and my efforts, however modest, to thwart him, take on the aspect of a chess game. In that game it can be more valuable to place a psychological rather than an actual obstacle to advancement. I never stipulated that Mr. Walling’s conquest of Betty, inadmissable as such, made her unacceptable as Elizabeth. I merely suggested that it was hardly sporting for a man who had been so favored by ladies in the past to rekindle former relationships as a means to achieving the goal he had set for himself. Such repetition would hardly add luster to his legend. Enforcement of this guideline was left to his own conscience, which in the event has proved sufficient. Conscience did not, however, prevent him from capitalizing on his friendship with Betty/Elizabeth, who turned out to be equally friendly with another woman of the E persuasion, Edna. In the event, Elizabeth received more than the vicarious success of having proposed her friend: