Alice thought she would die of shame. She almost wished she could, because she didn't know if she could stand to live with herself after this. The shaken woman started her car and began driving home. As she wheeled her car, she found her shame-ridden mind wandering back to her husband. She knew it was the frustration of being sexually deprived that had caused her to behave in such a desultory way with the boy.
It had been five months since her husband died, and nearly a half year before that since he'd made love to her because of his illness. No wonder she had become sex crazed, but why did she work out some satisfaction in such a disgusting manner?
In her own shy way, Alice had enjoyed having marital relations with her husband. Now that she was getting over her grief, she realized just how much she really did miss the regular sexing of married life. Her physical needs lived on, but she had no man to satisfy them, no socially acceptable sexual outlet. Her proper period of mourning was not yet over, so Alice steadfastly refused to seriously consider dating again. Little wonder that Alice's troubled mind had begun to channel the strong desires of her healthy body toward sex.
Now, because of her past uncontrolled act with the boy, she felt she couldn't manage well at all. She had certainly tried to do her best. After paying her husband's medical and burial expenses, Alice had had barely enough money left to buy the small boarding house with which she hoped to support herself and her two fatherless children. Hal was taking the loss like a little man, but Kitty, who was only twelve, sorely missed her father. It wrenched at Alice's heart to overhear her little girl crying herself to sleep, and Kitty was still doing it once or twice a week.
"Oh, my poor children, to have a whore for a mother," she wailed. "And my poor dead husband! To think I did for a stranger what I would never do for him!"
During the early years of their marriage, her dear departed husband had frequently asked her to take his sex organ in her mouth. Alice had stubbornly refused to give in to the perverse act. Not once had she brought her face close to his loins, and never had she even considered kissing his big, hard prick for him.
But it was different with the boy, somehow, because of the boy's innocence and his smaller penis, and with the desire she'd kept bottled up inside her for so long bursting into flames and licking up into her yearning vagina, searing her viscera and driving her out of her mind with lust.
Alice had been crying hard, and now as she drove her car off the thoroughfare into the narrow street leading to her boarding house, her vision was still somewhat blurred by tears.
The shadowy figure staggered off the curb and lurched toward her just as Alice swung the Ford into the center of the street and aimed it toward her driveway. She hit the brakes, but too late. There was a sickening thump against the right front fender. The man screamed horribly as he did a backward somersault in midair. Then he hit the pavement and rolled over and over, coming to rest in the gutter.
Terrified, Alice leaped from the car and rushed over to him. He was lying there holding his back, groaning piteously. His face was a mask of excruciating pain, his features so contorted that Alice didn't recognize him at first glance.
"My back! God, Missus Darling, my ba-aacckkk! Doc Gordan! Call Doc Gordan!"
"Oh, my God, you're Mister Denton!" Alice cried, finally recognizing the drunk who'd been boarding with her for a month. She could not abide drunkards, even harmless ones like Mr. Denton, so she'd informed the small wiry man he would have to leave. This was the last night of his prepaid room and board, and now this. She'd run over the poor man, maybe broken his back. She felt awful over it, and had to struggle with herself to keep from panicking. "I'm sorry, Mister Denton! Oh, I'm so sorry! Can you walk? Maybe if I help you we can make it to the house."
"Don't move me! My back! Aaargh! Doc Gordan! I want Doc Gordan!"
"Yes! Yes, all right, I'll call him!" Alice promised, and she ran into the house, icy fingers of fear gripping at her palpitating heart.
Gordan, a large portly man of about fifty, arrived within five minutes from the time Alice called him. Together they rolled the pain-racked body of poor little Mr. Denton on a stretcher, and Alice helped lift the moaning victim of her carelessness into the back of the doctor's station wagon. She stood in the street, sick at heart and wringing her hands, watching until the taillights of the doctor's vehicle disappeared from view.