"Hey, Don, are you deaf? That's the third time they've called you on the squawk box!" his friend Eddie shouted to him from his seat on the fork-lift truck that he operated.
Don turned to the source of Eddie's voice. "Oh, I guess I was thinking about something… Thanks, Eddie."
"Thinking? Man, you must have been unconscious to miss that thing!" Eddie yelled as the loudspeaker was beginning to call Don Willard for the fourth time, the operator's voice showing signs of growing irritation.
His head throbbed with the sick-pain of a hangover, but it wasn't his morning-after-malady that made him miss the message three times running… it was his worries about Diane. He had awakened ahead of the alarm this morning and switched it off so that she wouldn't get up to fix him his usual coffee and orange juice. He dressed quietly and slipped out of the house without waking her to catch his ride to work. And all the way there he chided himself for his dishonesty… He had to tell her about the night before sooner or later, only he just couldn't bear to spring it on her now. Hell, she was carrying his kid… what kind of man would tell a pregnant woman something like that?
He shook his head – slowly, so the throbbing wouldn't become worse – and laughed at himself as he walked across the floor to the switchboard to get his message. You're full of crap, Don Willard… what kind of man would even do what you did? You went out and got laid and left your pregnant wife at home? You're rotten, buddy, rotten like bad meat!
"Well, there you are," the elderly telephone operator said snippily. There was a rumor going around that she was older than Mother Nature, but nobody could prove it. She had white hair that was purple now from countless rinses and a perpetual sneer on her lips like she owned the factory and everyone else just worked here. "I was about to go looking for you. Mr. Collins wants to see you." Don nodded and headed outside to the loading ramp. "Not there… in the personnel office."
The bastard, he thought. He's probably going to lay me off ahead of schedule! They can't wait to hand me that pink slip!
Sanderson, the personnel director, wasn't in his office when Don arrived, but Red was there, standing beside the personnel man's big walnut desk. Don winced as he saw the smirking grin on Collins' face and he wanted more than anything to knock his head around backwards, but he knew that he would need a good reference if he hoped to find another decent job.
"You wanted to see me?" Don said coolly.
Was it his imagination, or was Red looking at him strangely, like he knew some special secret? Oh, it's just my imagination… I'm getting punchy now that I'm almost out of work. A few weeks and I'll be like those winos down on Main Street, punching at their shadows and flinching every time a horn blows.
"Yes, Don… I have some news for you," Red smiled… or was it a smirk?
"I'll bet."
"You're off the list… you're being kept on…"
"I'm what?" Don suddenly perked-up. "Just what I said… you're not going to be laid off or furloughed. You can keep your job," he said.
Don stammered for words. All his defenses, all his fast comebacks had been shot down by this inexplicable turn of events. "But I don't get it… why me?"
Red laughed nervously. "Well, let's not question the front office… now run on back to work."
Sanderson returned to his office once Don was back at the loading dock. "Well, did you do it?" he asked irritatedly.
"Yeah, he's back on the payroll."
The personnel director settled at his desk and sifted through his papers. "I still don't like it… it's sure to cause trouble with the other men. But I'll go along with you this once, Red, because I've had no reason to distrust you."
"Right, Sandy… and that business about Mr. Cooley's wife had nothing to do with it, huh?" he grinned.
The personnel director flushed and waved the burly foreman out of his office. "I told you before, Red… I was just giving her a lift home and we stopped for a minute to talk. That was all."
Red laughed as he opened the door. "I don't care if you fucked her or not, Sandy… but whatever your reasons, thanks for the hand. I'll be seein' you."
He sighed deeply when the foreman was gone and reached for the pint bottle of Jack Daniels that he kept in the locked middle drawer. Only after he had downed a solid mouthful and popped a chlorophyl mint in his mouth did Sanderson breathe easily again. He didn't know what Red Collins was up to… but he didn't care. His own secret was safe for another day.
"Diane, Diane, where are you?" he shouted as he ran into the house.
She hurried from the kitchen, wearing an apron and wielding a half-scrubbed pot in one hand. "Don… what is it? Is something wrong?"
My, God, he's found out… he knows!
"Nothing's wrong, honey… I got my job back!" he beamed. "We don't have to leave and you can have your baby right here in Evansboro!"
Diane smiled thinly. "That's great, darling… just great."
"Is that all you can say? I just told you all that and you just smile and shrug like it was nothing." His voice showed signs of bitterness and hurt.
"I'm sorry… I guess the shock hasn't hit me yet. It'll take a while," she explained weakly. "I'll probably start screaming in the middle of the night when it finally comes home."
"That's better… I rushed all the way home without stopping for a beer just so I could tell you." He still had on his work clothes and his light windbreaker and he made no move to take them off.
"You're not staying?" she asked hopefully, though she already knew the answer. It was written all over his face… he wanted to get back to that awful bar and those women.
"Uh, no honey… I think I'll just slip back to the Stop-Over for one or two beers. After all, I've got something to celebrate tonight!"
And that's the way it went for three days running… Don would rush home from work, sometimes not even having dinner, and then it was back to that bar and his friends. Diane hardly saw him at all, like it used to be when he had to work overtime practically every night. Only then it was for them, for the down-payment on their little house.
Now… well, she was afraid to guess why he stayed gone so much, though in some secret moments she was glad. At least she hadn't been faced with the dreaded moment of making love again. He scarcely touched her now, slipping into bed after she was asleep, and hurrying away in the morning without even his coffee. For a couple of days, her relief at being spared the agony of lovemaking with the memories of her adultery still vivid in her mind blinded her to the real situation… he didn't want to make love. He was avoiding it as surely as she was that night after leaving Red's.
But like any problem, smothering it beneath the surface was no long-lasting solution. Sooner or later, like a volcano, it was sure to erupt…
"Diane… Diane, wake up…"
The voice came to her through a shocking mist of grays and blacks, an overpoweringly sinister cloud that had swirled about her and cut her off from the ones that she loved. In the distance, she could see her house… her unborn baby… her darling Don… but the misty fog obscured her way and she stumbled and groped blindly, never quite reaching them, always taking the wrong path… until she awoke.
His face came into focus slowly, as through the lens of some avant-garde filmmaker's camera. "Oh, Don… I was dreaming. What is it, honey?"
"Diane… I know this sounds stupid, but were you in Forest Acres last week? The night I was, uh, at the armory for Reserve meeting?" He looked more worried than angry and in her grogginess she let it slip out.
"Yes, I was there… how did you find out?" she asked before she could stop herself.
"A friend. Or that's what he calls himself. Anyway, he came to me tonight at the Stop-Over and told me, in front of some guys from work, that he saw my car in Red Collins' driveway the night before he changed his mind about firing me. They all teased me about it, but nobody knew that it wasn't me driving… Were you at Red's that night, Diane? God in heaven, tell me you weren't… tell me!" His voice rose in his anguished concern but Diane knew that she had gone too far now to change her story… the moment that she had dreaded now for days was upon her at last. And strangely, she was almost relieved to let it all spill free, exorcised at last of this awful shame!
"Yes, I was there! Oh, Don, I'm sorry… I did it for us! I wanted to tell you, but…" A resounding smack echoed through the bedroom as his open palm searingly slapped her across the cheek, knocking her sideways on the bed and almost onto the floor. She caught herself on the edge of the mattress before she could fall.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry!" he cried mournfully, grabbing her and pulling her back to a sitting position. "I'm so sorry, honey! The baby, I didn't hurt the baby, did I? Oh, Diane, tell me the baby's all right!"
She smiled crookedly, tears glistening in her eyes. "I'm okay… and so's your baby."
"And it is mine, isn't it?"
Diane's face twisted into a fierce scowl but soon relaxed into an understanding smile again. "Yes, its yours, Don. There's no doubt about it."
"How about Red… do I get to hear about it now?" he asked bitterly. "Or is that a secret between you two?"
Diane leaned close to him and touched his bare arm. "No, Don… there's nothing at all between us except the hate I have for that animal. I went there to see if he would listen to reason, because of, well, because of something that happened once."
"At Sal's, that place that burned down east of town a few years ago?"
Diane's eyebrows raised in surprise, but then she remembered that Evansboro was, and would always be, a small town. A small town full of gossips and busy-bodys. "Yes… that's it. I thought, well, I thought he might do me a favor. But he didn't see it that way."
"Did he force you to do something, Diane?" Don glowered. "Because if he did, I'll kill him."
"No, honey… it wasn't that way. He gave me a choice. And I took it… to try and save our marriage. To get your job back for you. But…"
"Don't tell me anymore… not now." He got up and walked out of the room. When he came back, she saw that he was carrying his bottle of rye whiskey. He took another man-size slug of the strong Canadian liquor and put the bottle down beside the bed.
"Since we're telling secrets, honey, I, too, have got something to confess… and it happened that same night!"
He told her about Lucy, everything, and as he watched her face, he saw that the tears dried up and the lines of grief melted into the prettiness of her smile and suddenly he wanted her like almost never before… more than Lucy, more than any woman. He wanted Diane, his wife!
"Oh, darling!" she moaned breathlessly as they hugged. She nearly swooned from the ecstatic sensation of his powerful arms around her once again.
He felt the fervent hardness of her nipples pressing against his chest, even through the fabric of his shirt, like two hot pokers burning at his flesh. He took his clothes off on a passionate impulse, stripping to his shorts as he crawled onto the bed next to his wife. She pushed them down as she snuggled beside him and they kissed frantically, desperately, as he pushed her nightie up and their bodies could crush together nakedly.
She gasped in his arms as she felt the long, dreaded prodding of his erection as it surged between her thighs. Only now the fear and concern were gone… and in the void they left behind, a raging passion that threatened to consume her alive!
Don felt her shuddering in his grip as if she were in the throes of feverish convulsions but it only excited him more. Who cared about Lucy and the dime-o-dozen broads like her? He had this beautiful passionate creature to come home to!
They kissed passionately again and their bodies rubbed lasciviously together, moistened with a misty sheen of perspiration from their anxious arousal. Don pushed his naked wife's legs up and let them drop over his, angling the warmth of her loins tight against his own.
"Oh, Don, darling… darling!" she moaned as his fingers moved down over her flaring hips and over the cheeky mound of her buttocks. She clenched her asscheeks closed around his fingers as he searched hotly in the smooth hairless cleft. Suddenly she cried out in rapturous delight as they discovered the pink quivering lips of her pussy. He caressed her anxiously there and she squirmed excitedly against him, her head tossing on her pillow as she grunted and whimpered in frantic incitement. She reached down between them and closed her fist around the turgid flesh of his cock and, with a gasping cry of relief, slipped it into the liquid heat of her cunt. He pushed toward her as they lay on their sides and she pushed back, swallowing most of his cock between the trembling lips of her pouting vagina.
Don groaned from the exquisite grip of Diane's twat around his burning erection, like a hot hand greased with butter and he pushed a little deeper into her cunt, slipping his thick tumescent prick between the clasping pink folds of her vagina. Suddenly, Diane could stand the wait not a second longer… she had to have him, all of his!
"Darling, darling!" she cried as she threw the sheet off of them and swung herself strongly over him and into a straddling position over her husband. Her head snapped back convulsively as the rest of his pleasure-pole slithered hotly into her belly. Her cuntal lips slid downward along the naked thickness of his erection until he was sunk to the hilt inside her and she began to lift her buttocks with her slender thighs and move up and down on his jutting stiffness. Her breasts jiggled and danced as she bounced up and down on his loins; a hissing moan escaped her quaking lips with every downward, skewering movement of her naked hips.
Don had never seen her quite this turned on… but he knew that he liked it! She was sexuality itself, womanhood in her finest glories, all rolled into one beautiful body… his wife Diane!
She was humping him with frenetic delight, lifting herself with the strength of her legs and then shuddering as she dropped her weight onto the upraised, impaling pole of his blood-heated prick. Don could see every inch of his good-size cock disappear wetly up between her legs, nibbled ravenously by the rubbery lips of her twat. Every time she skewered herself on his erection, her head tossed loosely on her shoulders and her hair flailed around her face like a thousand tiny whips and she moaned inhumanly as if possessed by a she-devil!
What was it that was transforming his wife Diane into a screaming, lusting demoness? Where was the usually reserved girl that he had married? Then one who still blushed like most Southern girls when the sex act was at hand? And what had changed her…?
"Oh, Don, darling!" she hissed, her eyes clenched tightly shut. "Push up, push up hard!" She was throwing herself down onto his impaling lust-rod with such force that he had to gasp for breath between her passioned skewerings and he feared that the mattress would collapse with the wild savagery of her fucking.
She leaned forward, supporting herself with her hands on his shoulders and he lifted his head enough to capture one of her breasts with his lips. Diane groaned as he hotly kissed her bare, squirming tit and his tongue twirled wetly around her crinky nipple as she pumped up and down ravenously on his cock.
Bit by bit, as the minutes passed, Diane's frantic ravishment slowed into a mellower rhythm of absolute connubial bliss and the passioned grimace on her lips melted into a smile of pleasurable arousal.
She could talk again, though her voice was still throaty with the emotion of her impassioned act. "D-Don… tell me about her."
"What…"
"Tell me about that woman… I want to know about her, what it was like," she breathed gaspingly as she pushed her naked crotch down onto the upraised stiffness of his virile, potent erection.
"I told you… it just happened. I was drunk and…"
"No!" Diane grunted with loin-searing passion as she lowered herself hurtfully on her husband's naked erection. "That's not what I mean… tell me what it was like… tell me about her body. Tell me how you… fucked her!" When she said the word, it seemed to hiss through her teeth as though she wanted to spit it out at him.
Don had never seen her like this, not ever, but it was incredibly sensual. Diane was climbing the walls with desire and now she wanted to hear him describe how it was with another woman. Suddenly, he had an idea… it was so dirty and cruel that he immediately dismissed it as an impossible fantasy. But then… Why not? They say nothing's wrong or dirty if you and your partner enjoy it, so here goes!
"I'll tell you… everything. But I want to hear about Red," he teased.
"Oh, Don, do I have to?" his wife cried, still moving up and down on his upraised cock in a slow sensuous dance of naked passion. But she knew in her most secret thoughts that she didn't mind… she wanted to tell him. She wanted to talk about it now, to purge herself of the memories that she had borne in lonely solitude!
"Yes, yes… he kissed me down there, he used his lips and tongue there…"
"He ate you, say it, he ate your pussy, Diane!" Don blurted.
"Yes, he ate me! He kissed my pussy and licked it and I went crazy! I think I wanted him to fuck me after he kissed me there between my legs!"
"That's what Lucy did to me… Man, what a blow-job! She nearly sucked my cock off! And that pussy… shit, she had a pussy like a teenager!"
"It couldn't have been better than Red's cock… it was huge!" Diane choked, not certain whether she had gone too far in their wicked new game of lovemaking, but Don only winced and gave her an especially deep thrust with his cock.
She groaned submissively. "But it was nothing like this, lover… nothing could beat this!"
"Same here, Diane… you're the best! Ride that thing, baby! Pump up and down!"
"Oooohhh, yes, yes… stick your finger in my ass while I fuck you, darling. Hurt me, hurt me soooo gooooddd!!"
"I'll hurt you, baby! I'll hurt you like you ain't ever been hurt!" he gasped, but it wasn't in anger… instead, he was burning up inside with a frenzied kind of searing lust!
He gripped her shoulder with one hand, bracing her in position as he pushed up with his loins, burying his cock savagely into her tremorous belly. His other hand reached behind her and searched along the smooth naked cleft of her buttocks until his fingers found the tautly puckered little mouth of her anus. She groaned anew as his stiffened middle finger prodded at the unguarded muscular grip of her anus… then, with a vicious thrust, he shoved his middle finger deeply into the rubbery nether-grip of her rectum.
"Unngghhhh! Yesss, hurt me, hurt me!" she screamed, writhing and bucking over with demonic-frenzy, pushing up and down with her slender thighs, each downward jerk of her hips impaling her on his hugely jutting erection.
His finger probed hotly inside her velvety rectal sheath and she squirmed back onto it animalishly as a rising shrill cry rippled from her throat… she was nearing her climax, she was going to come!
"Oooohhh, yesss… harder, harder! Fuck me, darling! Stick your beautiful cock in me and make me scream… Aaaaagghhhhh!!"
Her naked body spasmed, tautening and releasing, as if she had brushed a high-voltage line and Don felt the warm gushing flood of her orgasmic love juice as it steamed from the lustheated slit of her pussy.
He had held back as long as he needed and when she relaxed, his own spurting climax was added to the oozing wetness in a gush of hot viscous cum!
Diane shivered again as she felt his geyserlike eruption ricochet up into her belly until she glowed inside from the warmth of his sticky ejaculation. Finally, she stopped shaking and leaned over, her breasts close to his lips.
"Kiss them, darling, kiss my tits!" she pleaded and as his lips ovaled around the lust-hardened flesh of her nipple, he felt her amazingly start to quiver with yet another orgasm!
At long last, they were both completely finished… sated and relaxed, full of each other, and Diane finally rolled off her husband and onto the bed beside him. In seconds, she was sound asleep, a smile on her lips as she snuggled close to Don's side.
He rested himself on one elbow and looked at her, still naked and uncovered. He was confused… confused about himself, about his own sexuality. About Diane and what this sudden change in her desires meant to the two of them… but he knew that this would all sort itself out sooner or later.
Don had something else to think about… the part that he hadn't told Diane for fear that she would have tried to stop him. In the morning, after she was packed for the drive west, he had a stop to make. It would be Saturday and Red Collins' day off…!