Nikki (20 page)

Feel? She frowned at herself. She could whip herself into moods, intense ones, wherein she was feeling and nothing else, but the moments used themselves up swiftly, leaving her with a sort of hangover. Madly in love with Archer Cole, and an hour later going to bed with Jim Thelton.

As he mated with his wife at this moment, was Dolores actually there, or was she, Nikki, the real object of his desires? And lying on her back under him, Nikki thought, there, receiving him, was Dolores totally involved, or was she struck with frightening little suspicions about his zeal or lack of it? Did she, too, sense another presence invading their bedroom?

What if, literally, Nikki were to walk in, to observe them? What if, seeing her, Jim seized her and flung her onto the bed and possessed her instead, while Dolores wept and pleaded, unfulfilled, displaced. Stop! she warned herself, and at once lifted her chin a defiant notch, her eyes gleaming and staring at nothing.

And if Archer should come tonight and not find Nikki but Dolores and, broken, she would sluttishly submit to him, at the same time Jim enjoyed Nikki. Then the two men would go off, leaving the women together and broken. Dolores would begin to kiss and caress Nikki herself with rising passion.

The fantasy stopped at this unexpected lesbian shift. Chilled and stone sober, Nikki just stood staring. At the sound of Val getting out of bed, Nikki hurried quietly up the stairs, grateful for the distraction.

Dolores crossed the gray-carpeted master bedroom with short hurrying steps, excitedly conscious of Jim’s longer, pursuing stride. She entered her dressing room with her head tilted to one side as her fingers worked at an earring. She left the door open, dividing her glances between her mirror image and the empty doorway. She turned the screw of the second earring the wrong way, pinching her lobe.

“Ouch!” She looked fretfully across her shoulder and said, “I hurt my ear again.”

“Take it easy.”

“Jim-m-m?” she crooned. “Where are you?”

“Here.”

“Come unzip me.”

He appeared, looking stolid, and she made herself deliberately cute, moving to him in a series of tiny, jouncing backsteps. She dropped her head forward and lifted her hair in a bright; fluffy mass, exposing the pretty back of her neck, the sight of which usually set him chuckling and kissing her neck and shoulders. Now he simply caught the dress zipper tab and pulled it down as if he were opening a garment bag.

She turned her head and flirted back across her shoulder, holding her hair up and giggling. She bumped him lightly with her bottom two or three times. When he grinned, she agitated her shoulders up and down to be free of the straps and he took the straps off, then stroked the dress down off her hips. She stepped out of the dress, then took off her half slip, stood in pink panties and bra.

Her trim lower legs were dancy, her feet pretty; her sweetly formed breasts had not fallen and her arms and shoulders, neck and face were girlish; but between navel and knees she had too much hip spread, her thighs were too short and their upper fullness excessive … or so it seemed to her own cool eye.

But Jim considered her figure adorable, delighted in the yielding softness of her upper thighs and adored her little rolling curves. She was proud to show off for him, knowing he considered her every curve luscious with femaleness. She lifted a foot behind her for him to see.

“Aren’t these cute shoes?”

“Very.”

“I rouged my heels,” she giggled softly. She backed to him again, bumped him lightly and, reaching up her back pointed to the bra hooks. He unsnapped the bra, but he didn’t follow around with his hands. She turned, glided her hands sensually up her body, cupped her breasts and lifted them, full and soft-fleshed and pink nippled. “They’re perfumed,” she whispered.

“Yum-yum,” he said, but didn’t do a thing.

Deftly she slipped her panties off, put her arms up around his neck. “Bet you don’t know what color panties I’ve got on.”

“Pink.”

“Wrong. Feel for yourself.”

She was tanned all over except for the bra and pantie area, giving an effect of white panties on brown skin. He stroked the flare of her hips and the rounds of her buttocks, which clenched and quivered to his touch. She stepped her naked feet onto his shoes.

“Squeeze!” she whispered urgently. “Harder. Harder, like I’m all yours. Ouch, o-o-o-o-h.
Again
.” She opened wet-hot lips to him, bowed her stomach in against him, only half aware under the thrill of his hard, possessive touch that his response was tepid.

While he sat on the edge of the bed undressing she stood before him, stroking his face repeatedly, kissing him. He turned and centered a pillow in position on the oval bed. When she slid herself across, he lifted and placed her hips in position on the pillow with a detached, craftsmanlike air. She scarcely noticed it, wanting and needing him so much. She lay lovingly beneath him and received him and the world seemed again completely right and wonderful, because he was her man, the only man in the world, the lover of lovers.

Then somehow it was over too soon and while he dug under the covers, planning to sleep, she lay throbbing and chilling. She said with abrupt angry sharpness, “Thanks for the servicing. You’re such an
inspired
lover. You make a woman feel so cherished and beautiful.”

“What the hell ails you?”

She looked at him coldly and left the bed.

Nikki announced at dinner that she’d be leaving after Val’s birthday party. Dolores, already moody, stopped eating. She sat smoking nervously; her gaze dropped to the table.

After a while she blurted, “I know it’s because of the way I acted, hauling Jim off for a nap, embarrassing you, making you feel shut out. Isn’t it, Nikki?”

Nikki dropped her head back and laughed delightedly. “Oh, you silly doll! For heaven’s sake, I’m a big girl.”

“That’s so,” Jim put in. “After all, you’re not her mommy; if Nikki has decided she should get her money’s worth out of that apartment she rented, you’ve got to accept the fact that she’s entitled to do it.”

“Let’s face it, Taffy Head. A man and his mate need privacy, and I expect to be needing it too if I see much of Archer Cole, which I’ll be doing, I hope. I’ll never know when I’ll be getting home, and your plans and mine would conflict. In fact, I won’t be going with you two this evening, becauser Archer might be dropping over.”

“You did say he phoned. You could be serious about him.”

“I am!” Nikki said firmly. “For all I know he’s only a pretty boy. It makes me ashamed, considering the high opinion you’ve got of me, to go for mere good looks and not really give a damn about anything else, but face it …” She bit her underlip, looked away. “I’m simply
gone
on the guy. And I’m going to have him, and we’re going to get married, you’ll see. And I’ll be living near you. It’s going to turn out wonderful, just as you hoped for me.”

“I know you can make it turn out right. And I don’t think he’s at all bad and,” Dolores looked at Jim airily, “by
far
the handsomest, most exciting man
I’ve
ever seen. Aw, baby,” she was suddenly loving and contrite and went over and kissed Jim. “You know who’s the only handsomest and everythingest man I ever saw.”

Dolores’s relief in being assured that Nikki’s eyes were for Archer Cole alone was a delight to see. Nikki resolved that never again, by thought or action, would she betray her, give her cause for unhappiness.

Archer Cole arrived at eleven ten, long after Dolores and Jim had had their dinner and gone off for the evening.

“Surprised?” he said.

“I bet Jim five dollars you’d come.”

He was pleased. “You knew I’d have too much character to take your no, huh?”

“I was positive you wouldn’t pass up something free,” she said tartly. “Only there’s not going to be anything free. I’m baby-sitting and Dolores and Jim are due back any minute, so I can neither go out nor take a chance on doing anything around here.”

He looked unhappy, then brightened. “Oh, well, all I really wanted was to see you and talk to you.” He drew her close and kissed her forehead, then her nose. “You’re so lovely I’m content just to be around you, you know.”

“Uh-huh,” she said cynically. “Sit down over there. Now, how was your date?”

He didn’t answer, and, smiling to herself, Nikki returned to the chair where she’d been reading. She watched him as he took a nearby chair. He was wearing a white dinner jacket, superbly cut to his shoulders and to the taper of his back and long waist. He sat with an easy grace, crossed his legs and looked over at her with the pleased air of someone enjoying a show, while at the same time she gazed at him, liking the clean contrast of his tan against the white jacket, the set and structure of his head, the balance of his body. He wouldn’t be too hard to fall genuinely in love with.

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” she said.

They smiled at each other.

“You never told me how your date was.”

“Irrelevant and immaterial.”

“Is she pretty?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Tall, short, blonde, brunette, redhead; gay or serene?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. His eyes settled on the dozen or so books on the floor by her chair. “Read all those this evening?”

She nodded gravely. He looked at the books again, then amazedly at her face.

“Really?”

“Yes,” she told him soberly.

He looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said. He busied himself getting out a cigarette case. He started to light a cigarette for himself, remembered and came over to her, offering her one.

“Thanks,” she said, taking a cigarette. He returned to his chair, gave the books another vaguely disturbed glance.

“I never would’ve taken you for bookish.” He shook his head, laughing. “It’d take me twenty nights to read one book, instead of one night to read twenty.”

“You sound proud of that,” she said.

“Oh, not that I’ve got anything against it,” he said hastily. “But I’m not an intellectual.”

Nikki bent over the arm of her chair, counted the books. “Fourteen,” she announced.

“In an evening, in say four hours, you couldn’t do it,” he said challengingly.

“That should have been obvious from the first.” She laughed at him.

“I didn’t expect an outright lie,” he said snappishly.

She looked at him steadily. “You didn’t get one. You asked me if I had read them all this evening. I have. Not all of all of them, not even all of any one of them, but I have read certain parts of all of them … the dirty parts.” She laughed.

He looked at her, unsmiling and speculative, for several seconds. Then he shrugged and grinned. “I’ll bet that’s no lie.”

“You walk right into things, don’t you?”

He got to his feet. “Well, if you think I’m stupid, I don’t know why the hell I’m hanging around.”

“Sure you know.”

He sat down sulkily. “You annoy the hell out of me. Why do you do it? Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, then.”

“What do you do? Anything?

“Of course. You think I’m just a playboy, but I’m not. I’m with IGC.”

“Never heard of it.”

He laughed. “I get you … that’s a joke. It’s a billion dollar corporation, but you never heard of it! Aren’t you ever serious?”

“What do you do there?”

“I’m in management. An executive. I was an engineer; got my degree from Stanford. But it’s people I’m interested in, and they wanted me on the management team.”

“Go on.”

“On? That’s more or less it. I can expect within two years to get a branch-plant managership; a vice-presidency by the time I’m forty, with a division under me; then, with any luck, I should be in the central office with top-top-management by the time I’m fifty. And the policy at IGC is to take its directors from within the organization—that is, most of them. So, barring the unforseeable, I should be on its board before I’m senile.”

“You’re lots more ambitious—than I’d ever have guessed,” she said approvingly.

“I pass on that one, then; you don’t consider ambition a sin?”

“Of course not.”

“It seems important to me. An organization like IGC is a social force, economically, politically, culturally. A billion dollars is a big voice, and if a man works his way up to the policy-making level he’s got a meaning. Of course, right now, at my level,” he said deprecatingly, “I’m mostly potential … still playing in the minors. However, the same psychological problems exist on both the lower and the higher planes. People are pretty much the same everywhere.”

“That may be the sad truth of it,” she said thoughtfully. “But tell me, what are the problems now?”

“I don’t want to bore you with shop talk.”

“I won’t be bored.”

“Well, then, it’s roughly this way: my job is classified as coordinative assistant, but it’s not sharply defined. I keep in contact with the foremen and supervisors in several manufacturing departments and they relay to me their particularized problems and conflicts and—”

“You don’t mean personal problems, such as family squabbles.”

“Oh, no, that’s personnel’s job. We have a psychiatric staff serving the three Bay Area plants, and in cases of valuable personnel with character problems which interfere with their capacity to function creatively as team members, they’re given help free. But my own responsibility, currently, has to do with problems of departmental harmony, with techniques and procedures.”

“Such as,” Nikki persisted. “Departments … manufacturing—what processes and machines does it deal with?”

He waved a hand vaguely, lighted another cigarette. “There are punch presses and annealing ovens and lathes and grinders and finishing mills and a foundry with molders and furnaces. Oh, it’s a big operation.”

“I’d love going through the plant. I was once in a foundry, but what are annealing ovens?”

“Well, they finish the iron, that is, bake it, for several days. A metallurgist could tell you a lot more, specifically, about that. Naturally I haven’t time to know in detail everything that goes on. I deal with the people in charge, and get their viewpoints and their reports, and then I turn them in. On Thursday mornings we all have a conference with the plant manager and …”