Chapter 2

Living as she did in what had formerly been a rent-controlled apartment, quite a plum as far as the vast majority of Manhattanites were concerned, Pam had the added luxury of space, space which included a kitchen that not only had a window, but that was also big enough to easily hold a round oak dining table and four cane-backed chairs.

Nearly all of her friends bemoaned their fate, the exorbitant rentals they paid in modern luxury buildings. And almost every one of them were forced to eat in dining alcoves and living rooms, substituting ventilator grates for kitchen windows.

The late morning sun streamed brilliantly into the kitchen and the hanging plants, which decorated the window, were lush and full. There's absolutely no reason to be depressed, Pam told herself as she sipped her third cup of coffee and idly flicked the pages of the Sunday Times she had picked up at a newsstand the night before.

Bix lay stretched out on the yellow tile floor, sunning himself after having consumed his light morning snack. She looked down at his furry black body and smiled to herself, pleased with his loyalty and doubly pleased with the way he never failed to excite her, knowing almost instinctively what to do to arouse her passions.

It wasn't so much her training as it was the dog's temperament and seemingly natural inclination to lick and tongue her body, her cunt and her asshole in particular. But that, she knew, was not all that she had taught him, nor was it the only trick Bix knew how to perform for his mistress.

But this morning she didn't want to think of that, having caught sight of the terrier's bony penis when Bix had sat up on the bed, moments after she had felt the last searing convulsions which marked her orgasm.

She wondered if he was capable of disappointment, then dismissed the notion as anthropomorphic, not wanting to give a dog human feelings, to endow an animal--even one as obviously bright and clever as Bix--with emotions best left for people to experience and deal with.

But in her eyes, at least, he hadn't looked all that happy, sitting up on the bed so that she had been able to see the pencil- thin and triangulated tip of his penis sticking out from its black hairy sheath.

The glistening flesh of his dog-cock was wet with canine genital secretions, a thin slippery fluid that she had tasted on numerous occasions in the past, carnal episodes of bestiality, she had told absolutely no one about.

Shame was one emotion she had learned to cope with quite early on in her life, for before Bix there had been her first dog, a honey colored cocker spaniel who made up for his unremarkable behavior and intelligence in other and far more intriguing ways.

She remembered that first incident with the spaniel, when she had just turned fifteen. It stood before her mind's eye as if it was happening, right there in the kitchen. But then she blinked and the image disappeared.

No, she decided, I've done enough fantasizing for one day. It's time to get out and shake off my depression before I really end up in the loony bin. She did not think she was headed for a breakdown, but as she got up to wash the breakfast dishes she sensed that unless things changed, the pattern of her life that is, no good would come of her burgeoning anxieties and dissatisfaction with the tenor of her existence.

"Want to romp in the park today, Bixie?" she asked her dog when the last of the breakfast dishes had been washed and set in the drainer to dry.

Bix yawned and stretched his legs, his carrot-shaped black tail rising up jauntily, wagging this way and that as he trotted obediently behind her, back into the bedroom where she picked out the clothes she would wear that afternoon.

Less than an hour later found her standing at the top of what New Yorkers had dubbed "Dog Hill," a denuded though still fairly grassy rounded hill which overlooked Fifth Avenue and the 79th Street entrance to Central Park.

Sunday, she knew, was the worst day of all, when the park was crowded with families and Dog Hill was a sea of barking running canine bodies. The good weather, the first taste of summer in what had been an unusually rainy spring, had brought the people out in droves and as she stood and looked around her, surveying the view while she kept a diligent eye on Bix, she suddenly stiffened and refused to believe her eyes.

I'm dreaming, she thought to herself, ignoring Bix so that she was able to train both eyes on the tall athletically built figure who stood some distance away from her, halfway down the rise of the gently sloping hill.

She could see his profile, the straight aquiline line of his nose, the thick and in her eyes sensual lips, now set in a slight and almost dazed bemused little grin. Dark piercing eyes stared out, open and devoid of deceit, from under a pair of thick bushy eyebrows.

Even the same hair, Pam thought to herself, for the young man who now was causing her to stare almost blatantly and rudely, had a thick mop of shaggy and curly dark-brown hair, hair which almost seemed to be the identical shade of brown as his eyes.

She shook her head and held herself more stiffly, aware of the way she had been trembling. Her fingers clutched Bix's leash and the yapping and scurrying all around her did not serve to break her mood of silent and watchful amazement.

It's him, the same guy, the one who comes in the window, she thought, still not sure if she was somehow hallucinating, seeing a mirage, imagining the young man as he stood below her on the hill, his own eyes trained on a powerfully built liver-colored Doberman pinscher.

As in the dream, the stranger wore faded and skintight blue jeans, even scuffed square-toed cowboy boots as well. A work shirt as equally faded and bleached as his dungarees covered his muscular torso and Pamela smiled nervously, wondering if she was finally going off the deep end.

But when she blinked rapidly, the image before her didn't waver or fade away in the least. If anything, she could see the young man even more clearly. All the details of his face and body, details she had memorized as if the dream had come to her full-blown, not a product of her own subconscious yearnings, matched one against the other.

She shivered again, spooked out by the apparition that had magically come to life. She had waited so long to meet a man like the one who raped her, alone in her bedroom, that now she didn't know if she should just turn around and run off in the opposite direction.

But before she could even recover from her surprise, or regain her self-composure, their eyes met and for the life of her she neither wanted to nor could she even pull away from the young man's wide and unswerving stare.

He turned his head to the side and looked up at her and if there was such a thing as love at first sight, Pam knew that she was the victim of it, of Cupid's dart. Her knees felt weak and bravely, feeling silly and as adolescent as a blushing schoolgirl, she curled her lips up into a smile.

It was not ignored.

The fellow grinned broadly, just as she saw Bix race into view, running circles around the liver colored Doberman. The pinscher was a male, but surprisingly enough he and Bix seemed to get along fine, enjoying each other's company, enjoying too the canine games the Scottie so delighted in.

Bix yapped merrily and darted right underneath the Doberman's body. The smooth-coated dog barked loudly and sprang off down the hill, Bix's short stubby legs flying out behind him as he hurried after in hot pursuit.

"Holmes!" the young man called out as the two dogs raced down the hill, so involved in their own games and animal pleasures that, at least for the time being, they were oblivious to their masters.

"Bix, get over here!" Pam cried out, her feet moving in front of her. Almost mechanically she strode down the hill, one foot placed before the other as if she was just learning how to walk. She was headed right towards the young man and a smile still played across her lips.

"Holmes, get your ass over here... now!" the guy yelled out.

The Doberman stopped short, lifted his fox-like snout and then began to race back up the hill. Bix was right behind him, a black streak against the pinscher's short liver-tinted body. By the time the two dogs had arrived at the young man's feet, Pam was standing right before him, still clutching Bix's leather lead.

"That's a good boy, Holmes. Now just quiet down and sit still for a minute," the fellow said good-naturedly.

Pamela knew she was in love and the very notion made her shudder once again. She wiped her forehead with the tips of her fingers, able to feel how she had suddenly begun to sweat profusely. "You too, Bix," she said, her voice cracking and her throat gone dry and parched.

"Bix? Why Bix?" asked the young man, turning to stare at her the way he had done earlier. And, for a second time, their eyes met, the stare held rigid and unmoving.

"Why?" she heard herself replying to his question. "He's just... just a little Bix, that's all. Silly. I can't remember why I decided to name him that. It just came to me when I saw him, that's all."

"You're right," the young man agreed with another disarmingly open and good-natured grin. "He does look like a Bix."

"And Holmes?" asked Pam. "Where's his double-brimmed cap and his drooping pipe?"

"Oh," the young man laughed, "I only let him wear those things in the privacy of my apartment. Wouldn't want anyone getting the wrong idea. Actually, it was the look in his eyes that made the decision for me. Seemed so piercing, so inquisitive, even when he was just a pup."

Pam glanced over at the Doberman. He was sitting at his master's feet, his great wet tongue hanging out of his mouth. Her eyes slid down, caught sight of the long thinly furred sheath that concealed the dog's cock and then jerked back to the young man's smiling face.

"Want to go for a cup of coffee?" he suddenly blurted out, almost as if he was now as nervous as she was.

"What?" she said, startled by the swiftness of the stranger's invitation. "I... I don't even know your name."

"And if you did... would it make any difference?" he said. "But to set your mind at ease, I'm listed in the Manhattan directory, under W for Whitlock. Justin Whitlock."

"Pam Harper," she replied, finding herself extending her hand as they grinned back at each other and shook hands like two businessmen meeting each other for the first time before sitting down to lunch.

"Good, then it's settled," he said, whereupon he attached the chain leash he held to Holmes' collar.

Pam clicked Bix's lead into place and the two of them, led by their two straining panting dogs, moved down the hill towards the 79th Street exit from the park. Pam felt at a complete loss for words, nodding her head numbly as Justin spoke to her.

She was growing acutely aware of the way he kept glancing at her from the corner of his eye. It was a look she had seen before, as recently as the previous evening in fact, when Dick Truman had taken her out for dinner.

But whereas Truman's leering wolfish grin had turned her off, had frightened her in point of fact, she accepted Justin's obvious interest in her with something that resembled downright pleasure and considerable delight.

She had never met a man this way, a complete and total stranger. For all she knew he could be a homicidal maniac, a psychotic, sexually maladjusted. But even if all that was true, nothing was going to stop her from finally taking a chance with her life and doing the one thing which now came to her as naturally and easily as the very act of breathing, of inhaling and exhaling as she walked alongside of him.

When they reached Fifth Avenue they turned left, heading uptown. They walked past the crowds surging in and out of the Metropolitan Museum, past some of the embassy buildings that were located along Fifth Avenue, in view of the park.

She didn't ask him where they were going, if he intended to stop at a coffee shop or head straight back to his apartment. Secretly, she hoped he would choose the latter and when he caught hold of her elbow and guided her across Fifth Avenue and down Eighty-eighth Street, she smiled to herself and didn't utter a single word of protest.

"Five flight walkup," he announced when they reached the unrenovated brownstone where he rented an apartment. "Sorry about that, but I refuse to be subsidized by dear old dad."

"I don't care. I like to walk," she replied, shy again as she followed him up the granite steps which led into the pocket- sized vestibule and lobby of the building.

Justin dug into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a ring of keys, selecting the correct one to unlock the front door. Then, moving down the dimly illuminated and narrow hallway, he led Pam upstairs to his apartment.

She followed right behind him; able to hear the way her heart was beating like a steam-hammer in her breast, able to feel the nervous pulsing throb of blood in her temples. But even more than that, she was becoming acutely aware of another sensation, one that she had experienced in the past, but rarely if ever as a result of being in the company and presence of a man.

Between her legs she could feel how juice was seeping down, trickling along the walls of her cunt and oozing over her hairy pubic mound. She was wearing a skirt and she was almost startled at the way her crotch had gotten suddenly wet and swampy, juice threatening to actually drip down along the insides of her thighs.

The walls of her cunt could be felt fluttering again and again and she could hardly believe her body was responding like this, for she had not felt this kind of sexual reaction to anyone in so long that she had almost forgotten what it could be like.

But now, she knew exactly what it was like, for she was unable to stop shaking, unable to stop staring up at Justin's muscular back, his tight boyish ass outlined beneath the skintight covering of his jeans, or the long thickly muscles back of his calves and thighs.

His body seemed to radiate the same kind of intense animalism as Holmes' wiry and powerful build, dog and master appearing in her eyes to be even more suited to each other than she had first thought. This is insane, she told herself. What am I doing here, following this guy upstairs to his apartment, when I don't even know who he is, or anything about him?