Gwen was on the porch when Don's Mercedes pulled up in front. She threw her half-smoked cigarette into the sandy yard, lighting another as she went to him.
He met her at the nose of the car, shocked at the whiteness of her skin, the drawn and worried cast to her features. "Did she take it that hard?" he asked.
"I didn't get the chance to tell her anything," Gwen said. "When I got back, she and Chris were on her bed-he must have come over while I was with you-and they were naked and-"
"He was fucking her?" Don asked, round-eyed. It wasn't exactly news to him, but to get it first-hand, definite-that was a shock.
"No, they were playing checkers!" Gwen shouted. "What do you think they were doing? Can't you see how upset I am? I sent Chris home and told Cathy to get packed, but she must have decided to hell with it and crawled out her bedroom window. She was gone when I went in, and there was a note for me-she said she was leaving and never wanted to see me again."
"Could she have gone to visit a friend, maybe, until the tantrum wore off?"
"I thought of that. The only people she knows here, as far as I'm aware, are Chris and Jennifer,
the girl in the next cottage down the beach. I called Jennifer and she said no, Cathy hadn't been there, that she'd seen Cathy standing on the main road with her thumb out. Before she could go up to see what it was all about, a turquoise Pontiac had stopped and Cathy jumped inside. She didn't know the car, and all she could say was that it was pointed away from here-and that it had Rhode Island plates."
"She's trying to leave the island," Don said. "That's what it looks like to me. Where could she go?"
"We have an apartment in New York-we don't use it much and the furnishings are in the process of being moved to our new place in Georgetown. She might go there."
"Does she have any money?"
"A few dollars that I know of. Of course, there's two or three thousand in her checking account and there's a trust fund-but she can't touch that till she's twenty-one; That's it, Don! She's on her way to New York to liquidate her checking account! We have to find her!"
"I'll get going. Unless they're lucky, they might have missed the ferry. They could be waiting on the pier right now." He started back around the front of his car. "You wait here, in case she does come back. Chris is at home.. I told him not to leave. If she shows up there, he'll call you."
"Did you tell him?" Gwen asked as Don slipped behind the steering wheel.
"No time," he said. "You called just as he was coming in. Look, Gwen," he went on, turning the ignition. "I know we don't have any relationship at all, you and I, but Cathy is my daughter and I'm just as worried as you are. I'll find her or die trying." He turned the engine over, slipped into reverse, and backed onto the road. She watched him disappear down the highway.
Cathy stood on the gravel beside the road, her hand shielding her eyes from the nearly setting sun, her thumb thrust out jauntily in ride-begging position. Jesus, she thought, I've fucked around half the day and look how far I've gotten. She was still on the outskirts of New Gloster, the sleepy little town which served as terminus for the ferry line from the island. Indeed, if she were to take a stroll down the beach from the pier she could, if the light was right, see the island cottage she'd fled so angrily.
She heard a car coming her way, and she turned to face it, smiling jauntily, her thumb jabbing in the direction of New York. Her blouse was unbuttoned into the creamy, freckled vale between her tits, far enough to show that she was braless under the shirt, and she contemplated, then dismissed the idea of flipping the shirt aside to give the driver a peek at a brown-pointed boob as further inducement to stop and pick her up. It might be a woman, she told herself, or maybe a guy with his kids, and she'd only hurt her chances.
The car came over a low rise, and she saw that it was a Mercedes. Cathy sighed. It had to be either Chris or his father. The car stopped, pulling off the road a few feet past her, and the driver's door opened. It was Don Robinson, she knew although she'd never really met him, and he came to her.
"Cathy," he said, "your mother is very upset about this."
"Screw her," Cathy blurted. "I'm finished with Gwen. You aren't headed for New York by any chance, are you?"
He took her hand in his and spoke firmly. "No,
and neither are you. Get in the car."
As he turned around a little farther down the road, he began to speak once more. "You're a hard girl to find. I've been cruising the highways and by-ways for hours. And still you're not five miles from where you started."
"It's a long story," Cathy grimaced.
A long story indeed, she thought. That bastard who'd picked her up on the island. "Sure," he'd said, "I'm going your way. Hop in."
He was a pleasant enough guy to look at-in his early thirties, she supposed, neat, clean, with a groovy car. And they'd made the ferry with plenty of time. But as the boat pulled out of the island dock to begin the twenty-minute trip to the mainland, he'd changed from a nice, quiet-spoken dude into a sex fiend who couldn't keep his hands away from Cathy's tits and legs.
"Stop it!" she'd squealed, not wanting to get into any heavy foreplay in the car, where everyone on the ferry could get their jollies watching, but her protestation had only made him that much more energetic and finally, when he had her blouse half-off and one tit shining in the sunlight, she'd offered him an alternative, the promise of a really co-operative session as soon as they could find some seclusion on the Massachusetts shore.
"I've got a better idea," he told her then, and she followed his eyes as they looked towards the door of the ship's men's room.
"Oh, no," Cathy cut in. "That's crazy."
But even as she tried to dissuade him, he was getting out of the car and coming around to open her door, pulling her forth by the wrist and leading her to the toilet entrance. She was red as a beet,
convinced that the ferry's crew and the other passengers were all staring at her, branding her a cheap slut, but she went inside with him and watched as he locked the door.
"How do I know," he began, sitting down on the John which, with a sink, made up the room's total furnishings, "that you're worth taking to New York if you don't give me any convincing evidence?" He motioned for her to kneel and as she did he unzipped his pants and removed his cock. "Do me good," he invited.
Cathy took his prick in her hands, the limp tool flopping as she tried to hold it upright. She opened her mouth and sucked his rod in, aided by the relative smallness of his soft pecker. Her hands began to squeeze his balls expertly and soon enough she felt his cock growing stiff and tight in her mouth, ready to be sucked.
"That's nice," he commented, patting her hair. "There's no headjob like a teeny-bopper headjob. Come on, teeny-bopper, suck it just far me."
All right, stud, Cathy thought, and she began to suck his dick frantically, her head bobbing up and down on the stiff prick which impaled her mouth. His cock was long once it'd gotten hard-the tip of his rod thrust low down her tongue, trying to invade her throat every time she sucked it home, and Cathy was afraid she'd either gag or strangle if he got carried away and started to hump her mouth.
Her tongue rolled around his glans, her teeth scraped the rigid barrel of his dick, and her saliva bathed him from tip to balls. She began to twist her head, to pressure his cock from one angle, then another, all the while bouncing his nuts in her hands, teasing her fingers across his perineum and around the puckered ring of his asshole-anything to get him hotter, to make him squirt, so she could get this finished.
Jesus Christ! she fumed inside her brain. This bastard must be into yoga or something. It seemed as if she'd been sucking his cock for half an hour and it was still rigid and hard and he appeared totally calm and collected. The impassive look on his face belonged to a proctor monitoring a classroom exam, not to a guy getting his cock sucked! Hurry up, she prayed, hurry up and shoot your snot!
There was a rattling sound at the front of the ferryboat. Good God, Cathy told herself, we're pulling up at the pier in New Gloater! She began to suck harder, to no more evident effect, and she started to panic at the futility of it all.
Quickly she pulled her head back, till only the point of his prick was between her lips, and she began to rub her hands up and down his shaft, shucking the skin covering of his rod. That was better, she knew at once. His hips began to move as he sat upon the lid of the john and she could feel him squirming more and more as she gave him a. combination of handjob and knob-nibbling.
He put his hands on her head again, stroking and twining in her blonde hair, and then he lifted his ass slightly and she felt his cock give an unmistakable jolt of release. The head seemed to swell to double its normal size, and it burst open in the cuddle of her lips.
His first squirt of cum hit her hard, in the back of the throat, and she swallowed it quickly, but the next burst arrived on the heels of. the other and some of it dribbled onto her lips, making them slick, and his prick slid out of her careful mouth grip. Her hands were still jerking him off, but everything was happening too fast. The ferry had stopped definitely, she could hear the clinging of chains as the crew began to make ready for disembarkation of the boat's load of cars, and she knew that theirs was the third car in line, that unless they hurried traffic would be bottled up and horns would be blowing and-oh, shit!
Cathy took his sperm full in her face, not even trying to get his cock back into her mouth. He drenched her with his fuck juice, spraying her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her chin, and she masturbated him until his balls were drained.
"Come along," he told her, standing up and reinserting his cock within his pants. "We'll have to be leaving the boat now." She followed him out the door, no longer giving a rat's ass who saw her, not even caring that his globby cum was all over her face, dripping from her lips, plain as day to anyone who might look. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyelids and brows, mopping at the jizz which clung there, and she got into the turquoise Pontiac with him, feeling cheap and slutty. Sex could never be the same again, now that she'd met Chris, but this was the price she must pay if she wanted to be free of Gwen, if she wanted the chance to start a life of her own, one that she could share with Chris.
The first car had already begun to move off the ramp when Cathy's pickup started his engine.
They drove off the dock, turning onto the main drag of the sleepy little village, and Cathy saw a service station ahead. "Look," she told the guy, "can you stop there a minute, so I can wipe my face? I won't be long."
"Oh, sure," he'd said, giving her a pearly-toothed smile. "Take as long as you need."
She hadn't wasted a minute, either, soaking some towels and washing her face clean, but when she'd come out of the ladies' room, the turquoise Pontiac was nowhere in sight and the pump jockey told her the car had zoomed away after the driver
let her out. Cathy fumed a moment, her mind stringing a series of redoubtable curses, but what was the use? She had some money and she was hungry, so she went into the nearest restaurant and ordered up a seafood dinner.
Afterwards she'd wandered around New Gloster for what must have been hours, going nowhere, doing nothing. She wondered if it might not be better to go back to the island, to face Gwen, to tell her mother that little Cathy was no longer a baby, that it was time for the bird to leave the nest.
Oh, it wasn't Gwen's fault-not entirely. She knew what a shock it must have, been for her mother to catch them on the bed, fucking doggie-style, no less, but at the same time it was Gwen's fault, too. Cathy had gown into a young woman almost unobserved, while her mother had been away in southeast Asia or Africa or God knows where else, interviewing Henry Kissinger and Arafat and anyone else who happened to be in the news, and Gwen didn't seem to have caught onto that fact yet. Cathy couldn't be a baby forever. She was eighteen, she was not a virgin, and she knew what she wanted for the rest of her life-to make love with Chris Robinson. Gwen would simply have to accept that, to live with the knowledge that Cathy was a person in her own right and not merely an extension of the glamorous lady journalist.
And then she thought of the ludicrous way Gwen had reacted-the panicky "let's get out of here" commandments, the assumption that if she took Cathy away from Chris, the entire affair would pass into forgotten history. The facile and flawed judgment her mother had made infuriated Cathy nearly as much now as it had at the time, and it sealed her decision. She would leave, by God! She really would! In the fading light of early evening she had gone determinedly to the highway to hitch another ride.
"First," Don was saying, "I want to call your mother, and then we're going back to the island."
Cathy sighed. She was trapped. She was not only trapped, she was strapped, into the seatbelt of the Mercedes, and she couldn't even jump out of the car to prevent the enactment of Don's intentions. Besides, he'd find her quickly and easily, unless she went into the water and swam to New York. She eased back in the seat and let fate take its course.
Don stopped at a service station to use the phone booth. Cathy noted with some interest that it was the same station where she had gone to clean her face, but beyond that she had no other thought.
Gwen jumped when the phone rang, and she picked it up before it had sounded a second time. "Oh, my God," she said, "is that you, Don?"
"It is, and Cathy's in the car. I think I drove every back road within twenty miles, trailing that turquoise Pontiac, and she was in New Gloster all the time."
"Is she all right?" Gwen asked hesitantly.
"She seems to be fine. A little upset, but that's all. We'll be over as soon as the ferry comes in."
"Oh, no!" Gwen wailed. "It stops running at seven and it's-oh, I thought so!-it's almost eight."
"Don't worry, then," Don assured her. "I'll find someplace for us to stay till morning and we'll come back then. There must be a motel around somewhere."
"I suppose so," Gwen agreed. "And maybe by morning Cathy will have calmed down enough to
talk to me. Don, I'm afraid we're going to be forced into having a long, four-way explanation session tomorrow, too. We can't put it off any more."
"You're right," he said. "You're absolutely right. Tell you what-I'll take Cathy to dinner and then we'll find ourselves a couple of rooms. See you first thing in the morning."
"I'll be at the landing when the first ferry unloads. And Don-thank you very much."
"You don't have to thank me," he said. "After all, she's my daughter, too."
Don led Cathy into the room. "I'm sorry," he told her, "but this is the only one they have; It's the tourist season and both motels are almost filled up. Counting us, they are filled up. So-you get some sleep. I'll wait out in the car."
"In the car?" Cathy giggled. "There're two beds in here. You can't sleep in a car when you've already paid for a bed. That's silly."
"It wouldn't look good," he protested.
"Bullshit," Cathy sneered. "It'll look worse if you park me here and then sack out in the Mercedes. Besides-how do you know I won't run away in the night? Qh, come on, Mr. Robinson!" She sat down on the edge of the bed, then flopped on her back, raising her feet from the floor to bicycle them in the air.
"Anyway," she told him, "I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself if you get fresh or anything." He could see the unhaltered curve of her tits outlined in the clinging shirt she wore, and the flared pants did not conceal the shapeliness of her strong young legs. She was a big girl indeed, he thought. And she was his daughter. If he couldn't
share a two-bed motel room with bin daughter- "What did you tell him?" Cathy suddenly wondered, sitting upright again. "The desk clerk, I mean. How did you explain the fact that you were sneaking in a fresh young piece like me?" She laughed then, pointing her finger at him. "I'll bet you told him I was your niece, right? No! Your daughter! Am I right? Did I hit on the nose that time?"
Don couldn't repress a blush. He'd registered them as father and daughter indeed, Donald and Catherine Robinson. "It seemed the easiest way," he explained hesitantly.
"Doesn't matter," Cathy shrugged. "I mean, everybody uses a fake name far motels anyway, don't they? It's the American way."
She got up then and went into the bathroom. He heard her turning on the shower, and he listened to the water running for a long time. At last it stopped, and he fancied that he heard Cathy drying herself then, with a stiff and scratchy motel towel, while she hummed softly. Oh, hell, he told himself as he took off his shirt and trousers before climbing into his own bed. This war like something out of a dirty movie. He pulled the sheet up to his chest and tried to relax.
Cathy came out of the bathroom, clothed once more, her shirt not completely buttoned. When she moved, he could see inside her blouse the soft curve of a peachy tit, almost to the nipple. She paused a moment by her bed, looking across at him.
"Lib, Mr. Robinson," she began with a fetchingly demure smile, "I should tell you-I always sleep in the raw. Do you mind?"
He shook his head. "Maybe you could wear your bra and panties tonight," he suggested, mentally kicking himself in the ass when he remembered
that she was obviously not wearing a bra. He hoped she was wearing panties, at least.
She laughed. "No chance," she said. "Do people still wear undies, these days? Oh, look-I'll just sack up in my clothes, okay? I mean, I don't know if I'll be able to get to sleep that way, but-"
"I'll turn off the light," he suggested, "and you can go to bed however you please." He leaned to the table between the beds and flipped out the lamp, settling back beneath his sheet.
There was a light in the motel court outside, however, and the beam appeared to be trained upon the window of their room. Even with the table lamp off and the curtains drawn, the interior was bight as a moonlit stretch of beach, and Don realized that it simply wasn't going to work. And then, reason settled in upon him. Cathy was his daughter, even if he'd recalled her as little Susie all these years past. He'd seen her naked before-he remembered how cute her tiny ass looked when Gwen was diapering it. There was no difference, he told himself. No difference at all.
It was with that attitude of tolerant father that he watched as Cathy undid the two bottom buttons holding her shirt. Her fingers gleamed pale in the room's half-light, and he saw those fingers fly as she slipped out of the shirt. He repressed a sigh of admiration when his eyes made contact with her fine, brown-nippled tits, so high, so round, so cute as they jiggled softly with her movements.
She turned to the side, and he couldn't prevent his aesthetic sense from approving the perfection of her half-clad profile. A beautiful face that could have stepped off a cameo gem, shapely uptilted tits, a flat, smooth tummy-she was a delicious sample of young flesh and he was proud to think that she was his daughter by blood.
Cathy unbuckled her ornate belt, unsnapped her jeans, and gave her hips a wiggle that made the pants drop to the floor. She turned again, the sight of her thick, dark pussy muff smacking Don in the face, figuratively speaking. So lovely, he thought, and so sexy-he wished the divorce and separation had never happened, wished that he could have watched Cathy grow and develop into the beauty she had become.
She turned down her sheet and crawled into bed languidly, leaving him with a vivid memory of her every motion. He heard her slide the sheet up to cover her body even as he projected upon his closed eyelids a full-color image of her nakedness.
"Mr. Robinson," she said, her voice a feline purr in the twilit room.
"Uh, yes?" he choked.
"You're not like most men," she announced. "Like the guy I thumbed with when I ran away. Do you know that he tried to rape me in the goddamned car right on the middle of the ferry deck? He was pulling my shirt off, feeling me up, with all the crew and passengers around where they could see everything."
"Disgusting," Don mumbled.
"And to make it worse," Cathy went on, "the only way I could stop him from doing that was to go into the men's room on the boat and-you know?-do him there? With my mouth, I mean."
Oh, Christ! Don wanted to shriek.
"And then, she said, "he dumped me at that same gas station where you called Gwen. Peeled rubber getting out while II was in the ladies'."
"Why are you telling me all this?" he asked.
Her reply was couched upon the silky vehicle of a soft voice. "I just wanted you to know how rotten some guys can be.
"But you're not like that at all. I can tell. I mean,
here we are-a really good-looking man and a cute girl, sharing a motel room under false pretenses, and I'm naked under my sheet. But you're so nice, such a real gentleman, that you haven't made the slightest pass at me. How come?"
He didn't know what to say. He shut his eyes, wishing he were able to will himself to sleep right now.
Cathy scooted across her bed, slipped out and across the narrow strip of carpet that separated her from Don. She lifted his sheet and before he could stop her, before he could even realize what she was doing, she was lying next to him on his bed, her slim shapely thighs entrapping one of his legs between them.
"How come?" she repeated. "Why haven't you tried for just one little feel, one tiny kiss, one sneaky pinch? Huh?"
She reached around beneath the sheet, and her hand closed upon the front of his shorts, where Don's cock had already become aroused from the sight and recollection of her nudity. Her fingers traced the outline of his half-stiff tool, and she pressed closer, kissing his body with the perky nipples of her tits. "Is there something wrong with me?" she asked. "Don't I turn you on just a little bit?"