Chapter 3

Betty walked down the long pebbled drive toward her station wagon, a mixture of anger and hurt setting up a wild race of thoughts in her brain that she knew no way to stop. She hardly noticed Dan Clark hunched below a row of hedges between their front lawns, until he sprung up with clippers in hand and said brightly: "Ain't you and Kent ever gonna take your summer vacation? Young kids like you got so much t'live for. When I was in fertilizer the wife and I kept puttin' it off. Then, as fate would have it, we grew old and it was too late. We sold Wertham Feed & Fertilizer, came East, and I never did get that trout- fishing trip to Wyoming."

Betty smiled weakly at her neighbor and, without responding to him, she opened the door to the station wagon and slipped onto the plush vinyl seats. She watched in a daze as Dan Clark disappeared behind his well-clipped hedges, then tried to reach for her purse. She couldn't move! She could not get herself to take her keys from her purse to turn on the ignition! It had almost been like incest, she muttered to herself. And, Shirley, the little bitch, had enjoyed it. She had shown such open encouragement to Kent! Betty brushed the anguished tears from her eyes and seized the steering wheel for support.

Finally her trembling fingers managed to retrieve the keys and she fumbled with the ignition, stalling the car twice before getting it into drive. The station wagon turned onto the tree- lined street and lurched slowly down the block. The sky was a bright egg-shell blue with only a few tufts of clouds scudding the broken horizon. Saturday; sprinklers whirred on freshly cut front lawns and husbands mowed grass, while children prepared for an afternoon on Manhasset Bay and teenagers and wives made themselves tanned and pretty for the Saturday night Country Club Dance. Why did all of this have to happen to her? Were her own failings so great that she deserved to be compromised like this? No, it was more than that! Her stomach sunk in anger and revulsion. That whore, Shirley had planned it, knowing of Betty's problems with Kent and had deliberately seduced her husband away from her. But Kent was no innocent babe in the woods. His open willingness to be part of it and even encourage the girl had shown with startling clarity what he had been up to during the past few months. No man willingly submits so quickly without being accustomed to that sort of thing.

Another surge of tears flooded her eyes. It became difficult to see the road and she slowed at the intersection to Pine and Whearty Drives and wiped her eyes again. A little girl was jumping rope on a wide sidewalk to the right of the car, humming a bright tune to herself, and for an instant Betty wished she was that girl; she longed for the gentle innocence of childhood, if only for a brief moment, to take her way from the dark tunnel of marital complications that seemed to make up her adult life. As though tossing a coin she turned down Pine in the direction of the north side of town and the Long Island Sound. She would head toward the beach and find some quiet place to think out what she should do next. She had seen too much this afternoon to solve her problems by driving around crazily like this. But she couldn't erase the memory of Shirley moving her wetly sucking lips up and down over her husband's lust-hardened penis. And that expression on his face: she had never seen anything like it when they had made love together... but she never would have performed an act on him like that. Shirley and Kent had become lower than the lowest animals through the very fact that they had consented to defile themselves like that! Fidelity. Chastity. These were concepts she could understand, but Shirley's so-called "new morality" was something that filled her with nothing but inner revulsion. She supposed it was her own upbringing that had made her less than liberal in understanding such things as adultery, yet it was her very prudishness that had made it possible for Kent to respect her before they were married. What had he called her a few months after the wedding? "I may have fucked you a hundred times since we were married, but you are still a goddamn virgin in your head." But it was Shirley whom Betty despised most of all. It had to be all her fault!

The thought struck her in a flash as she turned down Bruckner Boulevarde that she would go to Bob and tell him everything. He just had to know what kind of a life that wanton harlot was leading him into even if the facts hurt him as they were knifing into her at this very moment. She made a foolish U-turn in the middle of the triple-laned thoroughfare, heading towards Bellows, an exclusive North Shore community inhabited mostly by young people who were moving into the new rise of expensive apartments in a more rural area of Nassau County. For a moment her mind drifted from the tragedy of the morning and she enjoyed the view of open plots of land slowly giving onto rolling hills and patches of evergreen forest. But, inevitably, her thoughts snapped back, this time with a new undertone that caught her off guard.

She remembered the slowly flicking movement of her sister-in- law's lips, the pouting and swelling of cheeks as Kent's large fleshy cock had slipped up into her hungrily sucking mouth. Then she had seen Shirley swirl her tongue across the opening of the inflamed member's smooth rubbery head, and dip and swirl again below the crown, slowly licking upward as a child might slap its tongue and suck on a red lollipop. Oh God, the image came back and she was unable to stop it! She had refused to do it to him so many times and again she knew, with increasing certainty, that his evening absences had involved him in something more serious than heavy drinking with his county club buddies.

She was approaching the outskirts of Bellows, and she just had to stop these obscene thoughts! She could feel herself becoming involuntarily excited by the warmness of her pussy and the way she instinctively shifted her buttocks back and forth on the smooth seat cushion. Forbidden words flickered through her consciousness as they had done the night before perhaps it was because she had seldom heard them and never had said them that they had such significance to her. Words like cunt and suck and fuck and pussy and cock and prick... and a myriad of combinations. Goddamn it, she thought, outraged at herself, this HAD TO STOP!

She turned down Revere Lane and begun looking for the apartment. Bob had described the place well enough and she found it without trouble. A few blocks of bungalows done in Tudor style preceded the apartment house. Betty saw it standing out incongruously, a white circular building surrounded by freshly transplanted stubby-looking pines, and she parked across the street from the complex, waiting for a moment and trying to steady her beating heart and calm herself from the excitement that had abruptly overtaken her moments before.

But she couldn't. She found herself pushing back on the seat and pressing her vaginal lips into the form-fitting curves of the cushion.

"Ooooh god!" she had to talk to Bob before she went crazy. Grabbing her purse, she leapt out of the car and walked up the pebbled path that curved around to a side entrance of the building. Bob's name was not on the paneled list of occupants, but he had said he was on the fourth floor. She looked around the interior: potted plants, a nondescript seascape painting hanging unartistically beside a large gilt-framed mirror.

The elevator to the building was in disrepair she rang several times with no response and she began the long climb up to the fourth floor. As with the elevator, there was no answer when Betty pressed the doorbell and knocked. But trying the knob, she discovered the bolt unlatched and she entered.

"Bob," she called out. "Bob." Silence.

Betty looked around the living room and saw the half-painted wall, some furniture partially unwrapped and an open suitcase of clothes set next to the kitchen door. He certainly hadn't gotten much work accomplished since he'd been here, she remarked silently to herself. A few dabs of paint on the wall was hardly what she thought he'd accomplish. She shrugged and called out again: "Bob, are you here?" Again, silence.

She turned toward the kitchen. The refrigerator was open and she could see that he had stocked up well with beer and a bottle of mixer. Betty slammed the refrigerator door shut, and passed through the hallway into the bedroom suite. Here, things seemed to be a bit more in order; in fact it looked as though he had set things up to stay the night. The bed was made, a tasteful rug thrown down at its foot and there was a picture... probably a wedding portrait of him and Shirley, the immoral little bitch. She looked closely at the color photograph and wrenched back in shock. It was more like a wedding night picture than anything else, with Bob's long strong-muscled body laid out on the same carpet now thrown down at the foot of the bed, his large white fleshy cock fully erect and the red round swollen head partially hidden in Shirley's mouth. Shirley was bent over him, her long black hair cascading over his groin and her full-rounded breasts touching his stomach, one hand cradling his distended testicles and the other wrapped about his lust-swollen shaft.

Betty turned from the picture in revulsion. Enough had happened today to turn any woman's mind into an insane tangle of contradictory desires and thoughts!

She moved directly out of the living room and discovered an alcove leading off to the right. It was a porch or a sort of balcony to the apartment. She peered out alongside the patio-like floor and saw him: a direct reflection of what she had seen in the photograph, lying completely naked on the porch swing, a drink in hand with his head averted across large sparsely-furnished room towards the bamboo blinds that shut off the afternoon light. His nakedness in the flesh now and outside the realm of the photograph or the sounds of his lovemaking last night was startling and she drew back, not wanting to confront him like this. His head still averted, he raised his drink lazily to his lips and rubbed his hand on his flat tanned belly, running his fingers carelessly down to the soft blonde pubic hair that covered his groin. In another almost lazy movement he coursed his finger over his softened cock that still looked huge as it was and squeezed it tentatively, then more firmly. She watched the fleshy organ pulse out and grow in his hand, but he let it go, stretching slightly, then settled his hand on his thigh.

Betty shuddered nervously, and turned to leave, she was going to forget telling him about what had gone on, but despite herself her eyes remained fixed on his body. They drew her back, lighting on the harmonious lines of his muscled shoulders and arms lying on his stomach and thigh, and the half-erect blood-gorging length of his cock that must have been six inches long in that state alone. He sipped again from his drink and ran his hand over his relaxed thigh in another casual movement that was provocative to Betty. She must leave, she must go, she thought, take her station wagon and drive anywhere, perhaps to New York. She began to understand her feelings more clearly in this moment that was mixed with fright and wanton desire. She realized she was attracted to her own brother-in-law, but still she found no will to exercise, to help her leave the edge of the porch. Bob lifted up one leg and scratched his knee. The soft sac of his testicles softly cradled on the cushion beneath his slightly flexing buttocks and she could see the base of his long thick instrument rise up from the nest of sparse hair surrounding it.

Suddenly, she turned decisively on to the porch and stood next to the white stucco porch wall. He looked up at her casually.

"Betty," he smiled, his face becoming more alert and a slightly startled expression lighting up his blue eyes. "What are you doing here?"

"I I came here to talk to you about something," she gasped, flushing with embarrassment. "But, b but I think it can wait."

"Damn! I'm sorry you caught me here like this," he forced a smile. "If I had known you were coming..." his voice rose in apology, and then trailed off.

But he wasn't sorry. He couldn't be, for as he apologized, Betty still had full view of his long thick cock and what had been a slight erection enlarged still further. It stood out at a forty-five degree angle, a rock-hard shaft deeply pink right up to the faint collar of skin under the blood-swollen head.

"Christ, Betty, let me go put some swim trunks on," he said, swinging his feet onto the floor. "I feel as crazy as you do, talking to you like this."

Betty let out a short hysterical giggle. "I I guess I should have called you or something before I came."

"Oh hell," he said, slapping his buttocks in a cocky assertive manner as he faced her. "I'm your husband's brother, no? You think Kent and I are look-alikes?"

Betty flushed and turned her face away.

"OK. I'm making you uncomfortable. Be back in a second."

He trounced past her into the living room, whistling tunelessly to himself. "There's a bottle of booze under the swing. Some ice there, too. Make yourself a drink and get comfortable."

She immediately took his advice and retrieved the half-empty bottle of Scotch carefully set by a fresh tumbler and a bucket of ice, setting the bottle on a table to the side of the swing. She hurriedly plopped two ice cubes in the glass and poured herself a double shot, immediately raising the cold drink to her lips. The burning liquor taken straight had an instant calming effect on her nerves, and she leaned back in the swing, momentarily relaxed. It was embarrassing walking in on him like this, she thought. It was one of those awkward human encounters everyone puts up with from time to time. But she had had her fill of these incidents over the past two days. Bodies in lewd copulation poses, whispers that echoed tantalizingly in the dark; yes, it was like some kind of obscene nightmare. As far as Bob and Kent being "look-alikes"... well, in a way, it was true, despite the fact that Bob's finely sculpted features and almost innocent aura contrasted with his brother's rather coarse masculinity. The image of Bob's huge erectly throbbing penis standing out as menacingly as Kent's always did, the warmly pulsating head a few feet away from her, appeared in her mind's eyes again with haunting clarity. Lord, it was gigantic! she blushed. It must have been as big and as thick around or even larger than Kent's! she judged, and tried to shove the thought out of her mind. What had Bob said as he left the room?... "I'm your husband's brother, no?"... But did the blood relationship excuse that open show of intimacy?

She heard Bob rummaging in the living room. In a moment he appeared at the door to the porch again, his loins draped in a bath towel. "I just tied this around. Can't find my goddamn bathing suit."

Betty nodded limply. Bob picked up his half-finished drink from the table next to her and sat down on the swing beside her. "OK Betty, what is it?" he said abruptly and turned, looking directly into her pretty green eyes. "You really look upset. Have you been crying?"

Betty forced a smile and tossed her head back, taking a deep breath. "I just don't know wh where to begin. It it all started yesterday with you and Shirley," she murmured, trying to gather her thoughts, and then went on. "Let me have another minute to think. You can't understand how important this is, Bob."

Bob lay his hand in a brotherly gesture on her knee. It felt reassuring resting there, and it gave her the strength she really needed now. She resolved to herself that she would not tell him that Shirley had been unfaithful with Kent. She would simply inform him of his wife's infidelity, which was the important thing for him at this moment. Bob had a well-known temper, and if he knew it was Kent who had performed that degrading adultery with Shirley, Betty was afraid that the two brothers might come to blows.