And then, one day, a man wanted to buy a girdle. At heart, Helen remained the girl from the wheat fields of Dakota. True, she had been raped by a mad uncle. True, she had yielded to sly offers that came from older girls who had fallen for her freshness and above all for her figure. True, she had lain twiddling and sucking and tonguing and sighing with these girls in the hay and between the sheets, let alone the quick diddles behind a row of lockers in the girls locker room.
True, she had grown to like having female fingers explore her twat, to be followed by a female tongue so eager to suck honey that sometimes she checked her cunt, later, to make sure that it was still all there.
Let alone that our heroine, Helen Troy, had gone through a hostess-training school, and as to what happens in hostess-training schools, well.
But the experience includes men. Men haunt hostess training schools. They have been known to climb in through the windows and to wait outside in the shrubbery to snatch girls who had snatches, and probably no girl could get very far if she didn't have one, so that was not so hard to do.
Beside, they didn't have to snatch. They only had to ask.
So anyway, Helen had been to hostess training school, an experience said to turn any dewy girl into a wary and sex-wise woman.
Let alone the actual job of being a hostess. Imagine you are back in the last chapter. Again form an erection-encouraging mind-picture of that row of hostesses at that wild party with those rubbery South American businessmen. There the row of hot cunts stands, panties down, skirts up, displaying their well-proportioned behinds for a countdown on black-and blue pinch marks.
Such goings-on are not for the unsophisticated girl. Yet Helen Troy still kept something of the Girl Of The Golden West in her psyche. Her hair still reminded men – that is, some men – of corn silk. Her smile still told of prairie sunrises rather than of the sexual stew of a big city with its blue-tinged atmosphere of fucks, sucks, orgies and bodies-for-sale.
That was why Helen did not at first realize that the man who wanted a girdle was a transvestite.
"You got any idea what style girdle she would like, sir?" Helen inquired.
"Oh, uh, like that one hanging over there," said the slightly built man who wore an artist's flowing tie.
"Ah yes, our Model 444. Very popular. What size, sir?"
"Size?" he said vaguely, looking around at the sea of pink and pastel colors that announced what goes on beneath female outer dress. Then he brightened. "Well, sure I know what size, I mean, I never measured it in inches, but if you've got a tape measure?"
"You're expecting the lady to join you here?" Helen inquired sweetly. "Hell no, sister. Give me a tape measure and I'll put it around my own hips. I want the girdle for me."
"Oh."
"Listen we got an act going down at the Mister Madam Club. What we need is, we need one woman on tap to advise us, y'know, guys can make awful mistakes when they put on women's clothes. I mean, they know what looks good on them, like, I look mighty pretty in something flowing and yellow and with flowers in my hair. But they can make mistakes, I mean, wear a today's style with something that was stylish yesterday."
"Oh."
"So you got good taste, you gotta have or they wouldn't let you work here. So look, sell me the girdle, I send in other guys for girdles and tell them to ask for you and you give me a percentage, see?"
"I'm afraid that doesn't attract me, sir."
And meanwhile the department's buyer, himself a prissy little sort, stood nearby, watching them.
"Well, listen, we need someone like you. Listen, I got a better idea. You get finished here around five-thirty, six, huh or even on Thursday you're finished by nine. So you come on down to the Mister Madam."
"I don't think that that type of entertainment really…"
"Nah. It's you who gives the entertainment. Listen. What we want to do, it's wild, it's sensational, you never heard nothin like it. Comes the end of the show, see, all the guys in drag they pull out their pricks and wave them at the audience, which always is good for a big laugh."
"Well, meanwhile you been dancing along with us and nobody knows you're a woman. But when we pull out our cocks – we wear pink ribbons tied in big bows around them, I mean, we have a helluva gag man – when we pull out our cocks you don't pull out yours, if you know what I mean."
"I…"
"But when we all turn and look at you and march you out stage-center and make motions you should show your cock to the house, it's laughing so hard it's pissing in its pants, you know what you do then?"
"Tell me," murmured Helen wearily.
"You flop back, where two guys are waiting to catch you by the arms. And two guys lift you, one by each leg and they hold you flat, like that, with your legs toward the audience and then comes a tarantara from our three-piece band. And then…"
"I suppose they spread my legs apart."
"Yeh! Chee!"
"And I suppose the audience gets a good view of my vagina."
"Huh?"
"My cunt."
"Sure! So then they see why you didn't pull your prick out with a big pink-ribbon bow on it, and wave it! Hey, I can get you good money. I can get you, let's see…"
"My mother wouldn't like me to go on the stage," Helen said. "Ever since my grandfather took an actress for a second wife and it turned out she wore rouge, we simply don't want another actress in the family."
"Yeh, but listen, I got an even better idea." The transvestite leaned close, turned to gaze around for possible eavesdroppers, then whispered, "At the same time you show your cunt, you unzip your tits!"
"I don't recall zippers on my tits, but I'll check when I get home."
"Nah. Not your tits. Your bodice, up here. You unzip your bodice, which we got made to flop open, and you pop up your tits, which I see you got good ones. And hey!" the little man went on, blinking eagerly, as though he sat in the audience at the Mister Madam, hardly able to believe, the wondrous treat that unzipped before his eyes, "you show your tits, see, but first we showed our cocks, didn't we?"
"Oh, is that what you meant?"
"And then you showed your cunt, didn't you?"
"I seem to recall something about that."
"Well, now, hey this is great. This. Is. Guhreat."
"Tell me, tell me!"
"You show your tits. The audience cheers. Well then we guys, we see you've got us licked. I mean, see what I mean, we got pricks to match your cunt but when it comes to tits, what have we got?" He motioned into his jacket, made a throwing-away gesture. "We got nothing but pillows inside our bodices."
"For goodness sake! You mean it?"
"Sure I mean it. What'd you think, men got?"
"So what we do is, we throw away those little pillows because we can't compete with you, see? And you think the audience won't howl? They'll roar. They'll piss in their pants."
"They'll be awfully wet by then."
"Hey!" Another glow of inspiration touched the transvestite's face. "Listen to this. You ain't heard nothing like this. Listen. You listening? Because what we do is, we put a star on one of those pillows that the guys throw. They throw the pillows into the audience, and don't worry the doorman collects them before they get out of there. But meanwhile one guy in the audience, he's got the pillow with the star. So we give him a pass to the Girl Scouts Convention."
"Nah. A free drink! Or if it's a couple, two free drinks!"
"Really, sir, I need your credit card on this girdle. Or do you have an account here? Or will it be cash?"
"Ah, look, what you're afraid of is being typed as a stripper. But you ain't stripping. Don't you see? Between the cunt and the tits," – he outlined the area on himself – "you stay all dressed."
"My mother wouldn't like it."
"Listen, I'll get you even more money. Hey, boss says, five bucks for the cunt, five bucks for the tits, I'll tell him, hell no, not this gal, you pay her five bucks per tit."
"My grandfather would turn in his grave."
"Hey, maybe one of the other girls here?"
"Sir, I think you should go now. I have wrapped your girdle. Cash, credit card or charge, please?"
"Fuck your girdle if you're too good for the Mister Madam," the transvestite said, disgusted. "Who the hell are you, a leftover from the Ziegfeld Follies or something?" He walked away, waggling his hips.
When Helen turned from putting the girdle back on display, she found herself facing the buyer.
He wanted to know: And just what is going on around here, my dear Miss Troy.
He told her that the store catered to certain types of people who would be much put off if they encountered other sorts of types.
He said that he understood that a disproportionate number of men had been coming to her counter, which obviously indicated some, all, attraction she was offering them. Some, ah, service?
He said that if she wished to use her counter as a dating center for her, ah, assignations, she might well find a more suitable atmosphere at some other store.
She said, "I sold two dozen bras the other night, on my own time, after work."
"Admittedly so, but when I think of what dreadful transvestite orgy you must have indulged in, I shudder."
He didn't fire her, but he left her feeling insecure.
She wondered again about getting a hostess job.
A hostess job. Hmmm. At least, one traveled.
She felt her right buttock reminiscently. Not a single sore spot, any more.
But she stopped feeling herself in public when she saw the buyer watching her, aghast.
She supposed that her good sales record would keep her from being fired. Still, the scene had made for a rough day.
At five o'clock she walked home toward the two-bedroom apartment she shared with Tina McGill, whom she had met in the store's lunchroom one day. Tina worked downstairs in Office Supplies.
Generally the girls kept to their own rooms.
It was understood that one's visitors were none of the other girl's business, in a friendly way.
They shared the bathroom, but it was little trouble to pick up razor blades or cufflinks that men left behind and simply leave them on the table at the front door. Same with lipsticks.
Helen knew that Tina slept-around a good deal with men, but she did not think that any women had entered the picture, or had entered Tina's cunt, as the case might be. She herself had had very few overnight guests.
They had all been women. In fact, when Tina found a lipsticked cup in the kitchen, which they also shared, she pointedly left it for Helen to wash.
But Helen had been remembering Hank Hastings a lot, lately.
Back then, oh so long ago, when she had been a high-school junior and had had two ice-cream sodas with him, and had impulsively told him of how her Uncle Hiram had raped her, and how this had affected her attitude toward men, she had later berated herself for telling too much.
But gosh, a high-school kid sipping sodas in an ice-cream parlor with Captain Henry Hastings of Wanderlust Airlines! In his uniform! Craggyfaced! Big-jawed! Straight-backed! Broad-shouldered! Flat-bellied! Twice as old as she!
She could be excused for letting the occasion go to her head.
With her grades and her build and her breathtaking walk, Helen had had no trouble in entering Wanderlust's hostess training school. She didn't need to call upon Captain Hastings for aid. She wondered if he even remembered her, three days after their meeting.
Well, Captain Hastings had been using his time, while waiting for the first 797-X to be ready, in recruiting hostesses, as she knew. But also he had become interested in hostess training.
The girls at the school whispered that sure, he was taking down names and bust, waist and hip measurements which he would feed to a company computer to form a composite pattern of the perfect hostess to spear onto his captain-sized prick.
Helen wondered if a computer could do that, but at eighteen she was too shy to ask.
She did think, however, with a blush, that Hank Hastings probably did have a captain-sized prick. Sometimes she dreamed about it. She dreamed herself away from women and back to men, or rather one man, Captain Henry Hastings.
She dreamed him into her bed. But each girl in the hostess school, had, in her little sleeping cubicle, only a narrow scanted-single bed.
She dreamed of how they would make do in her narrow bed. Easy. He would lie on top of her. She would have his strong-muscled form cradled into her pelvis, which nature had fashioned for the comfort of a lover.
He might even lie there a little while, and how blissfully her warm breasts would absorb the feeling of his chest hair. She thought she would even rub up against his chest hair and let her nipples take in as much thrill as they could absorb. Which was plenty. (And in the abandon of a dream, double-plenty.) He would understand her youth, and the shock she had had from Uncle Hiram.
She would understand his maturity and authority and, to be frank about it, his experience with women, even Oriental women who had horizontal cunt slots, if the story was true.
But see, he had come to her! The glamorous captain had remembered her! He had wondered at the Registrar if some girl named Troy had checked in, as she had said she would, and when told, yes, Helen Troy had entered upon hostess training, he would, next thing you know, let his wonderful naked body down upon her yearning, soft and heated body in her scanted-single bed.
In dreams, you don't have to fill-in all the details.
She did not think he would penetrate her immediately. Instead he would lie upon her and kiss her lips with manly tenderness. And kiss her cheeks. And her closed eyes. And her yearning lips again.
When he kissed her breasts, he would make a delightful little game of it.
Whispering: "See, my sweet Helen love, here is our 797-X at the head of the runway." He rested his lips at the top of a breast.
"And here our 797-X begins its takeoff run." Drawing his well-formed lips slowly downward along the breast, yet at the same time raising his head because the breast's marvelous firm outward curve made him do that.
And with every millimeter his lips traveled along the silken skin, excitement rose in Helen's being. She felt her pulse in her cunt, going faster and faster.
She thought in her dream – as she sometimes thought when quite conscious – that although a woman's lips can thrill a breast and madden its nipple, a man's lips feel infinitely better. Because it all ties in with the hairy chest, and the way one's breasts flatten against that chest instead of merely meeting some other woman's nippled softness. And ties in with the strong arms that do not coddle one, but instead thrill by being hard and angular and different from a woman's, oh, so titillating different.
And the belly above one's belly has ridges of muscle. How could you conceive of having a soft belly pressed against yours? It's your business being soft and cuddly, not your lover's! Wonder of nature's greatest invention, the male prick.
Away with women!
Captain Hastings' manly lips traced a trail of fire along the swell of Helen's breast, and when he reached the nipple, he said, "Takeoff point."
But he landed his lips on the yearning nipple a few seconds later and said, "Landing, flaps down," and took that well-treated nipple into his mouth again.
She wanted to tell him how good it felt, but she couldn't talk because it felt so good.
And his prick had hardened against her cunt.
It lay pointing downward, its top pressed against her cunt. Her cunt began to bathe it.
"Ah, Cleopatra on the Nile," murmured her lover. "Thus she wafted her aroma of love to Julius Caesar, tong ago."
"Oh, Hank, Hank," she sighed dreamily.
"Thus did Josephine, the torrid West Indian Creole, signal her love to Napoleon, and gave him her silk kerchief drenched in her juices to wear as a life-protecting charm in battle."
"Oh, Hank, Hank, don't ever let me go."
"Mmmmm. Ahhhhh. Thus does the graduate Wanderlust hostess on my 797-X charm the male passenger into imagined seductions, mirages of belly-bouncing and ghosts of climaxes upon her lovely bod, on and on and on."
"Oh, you Hank! You're talking business!"
But she'd laugh as she said it, hugging him closer, getting another kiss.
And going breathless when he went at her cunt with his strong, bony fingers. When he trailed a finger up and down the slotted center of her eager twat. And when he replaced the finger with his entire palm, which he rubbed excitingly up and down and then made to travel in circles that never left her pudendum, and against which she pressed upward in a trance of delight.
And when he backed off a little to let his prick spring up from its partial inhibitment against her cunt. Now it lay upon her belly. Captain-sized? It reached well past her navel.
When her wonderful lover drew back a few inches to get into ramming position, his prick left, within her navel, a drop of fluid, like a kiss of promise.
The prick of her dreams now had its big knob of a head against her clitoris. The two exchanged throbs of passion and longing.
The prick of her dreams, guided by the firm hand of the man of her dreams, slid insinuatingly downward along the slot, probing, probing, now just within the outer lips, and sending radiations of thrill in every direction.
Found the place.
Pushed.
Filled the top of the glabrous tunnel while that glorious hunk entwined her again in the convolutions of a soul kiss.
Slid deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper! She found herself biting his shoulder in her wild excitement, and knowing that she only increased his passion. And then "Hey!"
A man snatched her off her feet and a car stopped alongside with shrieking brakes.
Its driver looked as though he was going to make a scene about this jaywalking woman, for Helen knew now that she had been walking in a dream. But Captain Henry Hastings in his gold striped uniform and gold-crusted cap said, "No need to make an issue of it, I am sure."
"N-no sir."
The car went on.
And, yes, this was Captain Hank, now in the present, when she was twenty-four, a hostess of experience, a fired lesbian hostess, Captain Hank who had saved her life.
He escorted her to the sidewalk and walked her along with his big hand beneath her arm till she got over her fright.
And looked up at him wonderingly.
"Don't you live around here somewhere?" he asked with his wonderful smile. "I was going to track you down and ring your doorbell."