She walked along beside him, at first having to lean on his arm because her legs were unsteady. But soon she felt better and at the same time became aware of the strength in the arm that supported her. His arms were as sinewy as she had dreamed.
It was odd to walk along in a public street, fully dressed, with a fully dressed man, yet seem to have been naked in bed with him only a few minutes ago.
She felt so dizzy and so wonderful and so lost and so found and so ashamed of herself and so happy to be alive, that as they walked she told him all about her dream.
Helen told Hank how, in her dream, he had walked invisibly past all the guards and straight to her bed in the hostess training school, six years ago.
And about how easy it had been to solve the problem posed by a narrow bed by simply having him lie on top of her.
"Naked?"
"Naked."
"Go on. I like this story."
"It's a dream."
"Dream it again."
How he kissed her and how he made takeoffs and landings from her breasts with his lips, and how she simply dissolved into a quiveringly ecstatic typhoon of ecstasy.
And how he had fucked her. Which had made the previous ecstasy not so much after all, once the fucking ecstasy took over.
"A dream, you say, Helen?"
"Such a beautiful dream."
"Well, let's make ourselves the charming couple whose dreams come true."
"All right. Sure. I mean, hey, why don't we?"
"If you'll stop here for a moment," Hank said a bit breathlessly.
They paused in a doorway. She knew he wanted to kiss her. He did. He also felt her up. His hand on her breasts had clothing to cope with, but the warmth came through from his hand to her nipple and went out from her nipple to his fingers.
He pressed against her so that she felt his hard-on against her crotch, clothing or no.
"Later," he whispered.
"You bet."
He knew she still felt shaky. Swell-headed though he was, he had his considerate side.
They went on to a restaurant so high-perched and so candle lit and so dreamily set to view the city and the lake and the sky, which had a rising moon in it, that its name did not matter. All Helen wanted was to be there with Hank. She never even found out the name of the wonderful wine he ordered. But it was good.
And Hank got good service. "Yes, sir, Captain Hastings."
He knew she was slowly coming back to herself. She told him the story of the transvestite and they had a good laugh together. But she did not feel like saying much. She hardly could think beyond the fact that Hank Hastings was going to lay her that night. This would make the second time, or the third, if you counted the dream.
The first time had been so very long ago.
He drew an envelope from his pocket. "What I was going to ring your bell about. You see, I stopped them from mailing it to you. I said, no, I wanted to deliver it to the best hostess I ever had, and that I still thought they had been crazy for firing you. Also it saved the President from having to write an embarrassing sort of letter. Embarrassing to him, I mean."
"Hank, what's this all about?"
"Well, seems you have won a prize from Wanderlust Airlines."
"Huh?"
"Probably you don't even remember entering the prize contest that the President set up about a year ago. Each employee to tell the company about some big profit-making opportunity it was neglecting."
"Oh! Yes! Oh! You mean -?"
"You won!"
"Oh, yes! I said the company ought to go after the many groups of women who hold conventions annually or semi-annually and make a deal with those groups to furnish their transportation."
"That's it. Go on."
"And I made a list of, oh, it's hard to recall but I looked up women's groups in politics and in the big charities and church groups and big national mothers groups and then the education-field conventions and all that. Scores of chances to wrap up a lot of passenger miles. Make them a price. Get a contract."
"And your idea has been kicking around for a year, but now you have won the prize. Why, the President has been wanting to know why nobody told him that women have conventions, same as men."
"Well, well, well. Let me see my check." Helen opened the envelope. "Why, the sons of bitches. One hundred measly dollars." She remembered then: "But that was the prize as announced."
"Yes," said Hank. "On an idea worth millions. But even so I heard high-level remarks to the effect that a fired employee shouldn't be allowed to win the prize. But I pointed out that you could sue the company, which would hot be the sort of publicity that Wanderlust likes."
"Except that I would never have known."
"Except that I would have told you."
"Oh… Hank!" She put her hand on his. He had hair on the back of his hand. It felt great. Not at all like a woman's hand that had been coddled with creams and lotions.
"Want to hear about some of the old gang?" he asked as he refilled her glass.
"Sure."
"Well, now, your dear old friend Cleo Prentice…"
"Cleo the spy. Let me think. She hired-out to a foreign government and went slinking around in tight black dresses and seducing their secret agents. She handled them five at a time."
"One in the cunt."
"One in the bumhole."
"One in the mouth."
"And one in either hand, jerking like crazy."
"Now, Helen, you have been keeping evil company or you wouldn't know such things. But what really has happened to Cleo is, she now has a staff of three fired lesbian hostesses turned into temptresses. She sits at HQ and receives their reports about trapping others. Her title is: Supervisor, Confidential Inquiry."
"Well, fuck her," said Helen, who was feeling good on champagne. "Except that it's too good for her."
"Oh, she herself is still making it with women. That's an open secret. But she is not a Wanderlust hostess."
"So there!"
"So there."
"Maybe she'll try to make me some day," said Helen with an evil grin. "That would be something to look forward to. Let's see. She spreads and wants me to go down on her. So I do. What she doesn't know is, I have slipped on a set of stainless steel Dracula fangs, and…"
"I must frisk you for Dracula fangs before I get into bed with you. Meanwhile, if you have much more champagne, I'll have to carry you home."
"Wouldn't mind. Long as you drop me right into bed."
He pretended to write himself a note. "Drop right into bed… kiss good night, chastely, on forehead… turn out light… go away."
"You forgot the fuck part. You know what I mean? Where the prick slides into the cunt and goes up and down and feels good."
"Is this the same shy little high-school girl I used to know?"
"And in those days you had your mind on nothing but the good of your airline, didn't you? Oh, Hank," Helen said, laughing, taking his two big hands into both of hers, "What's Carlotta doing these days?"
"Selling stock in her Buenos Aires establishment."
"Establishment?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"You still want me to be the high-school girl, don't you?"
"I wish we could relive it," he said softly, and he scratched his nails along her palm.
"Oh, you nasty man. Well, I wish you could have heard what some of the kids said about you after they saw us together in the ice-cream parlor. Like, 'Hey, Helen, bet your captain got his hand cold with ice-cream and then felt you under the table to give you a special thrill.'"
"Wish it had occurred to me. Do you like a cold hand on your twat?"
"Let's try it. And, oh, 'Hey, Helen, he's gonna fly you free in his airplane and fuck you in the cockpit. That's why they call it the cockpit.'"
"Conference rooms are a lot more comfortable."
"Oh, Hank, when you said, 'Hello, Helen,' while I was finger-fucking and thinking myself all alone, wow, that was a shock!"
"I should have arranged to have Cleo Prentice murdered on her way to the short-wave phone. But I was kind-of tied-up with Carlotta, right then."
"Oh, weren't you! Carlotta is a wonderful gal. Next time you see her – and I know you will – give her my love. Next time you see Cleo Prentice, spit in her eye for me."
"Both eyes."
"Can I have some black coffee?"
"They call it demitasse, here."
Demitasse and French sherbet. Memories and a dream man. Heat in the cunt. Tingling in the tits. Helen felt just fine.
"Hank, do you remember our first time?"
"First and only, so far and yes, I remember. I remembered it all the way from Seattle to Hong Kong, the other day."
"That's what you tell all the girls. But Hank… I remember how scared I felt, going up to your room in that big-city hotel…"
"In Milwaukee, it was, where you had gone to visit your aunt, who didn't mind your taking a couple of hours to go sightseeing by yourself. You were hundreds of miles away from home. And I didn't wear my uniform."
"You thought of everything."
"One tries."
"You were right, a big-city hotel is an impersonal place. If anyone took notice of me, they assumed I was visiting the city with my parents who had a room upstairs. Just get into one of their dozen elevators and push a button. Up you go. Your door was unlocked, just as you had said it would be."
"And nobody saw us together."
"Hank, you're a handsome sight, naked."
"You mean, my uniform does nothing for me?"
"You have a handsome ego too, my friend. Oh, Hank, when I entered your room and you took me into your arms, I wasn't scared any more."
"I remember."
"And I remember that I said that my only experience with a prick, so far, had been with my mad uncle's. So I got down on my knees, to see at close range. And you showed me the sensitive places around the head of the glands and you explained to me about a man's balls and why they must be handled carefully. It wasn't that I really, really had never heard such things before, Hank. You know, girls in locker rooms. It was that I wanted to hear them from you."
"You also assumed a kneeling position in front of a man with a hard-on."
"Oh, I remember I felt a little disappointed in your having a hard-on already, because I wanted to lick you into one."
"If you had found me without a hard-on while I waited for a lovely girl to join me in bed, you would have had reason to be insulted."
"I was awfully unsophisticated."
"Like, kneeling before a man with a hard-on, ready to lick."
"Oh, that. It seemed like a sophisticated thing to do."
"Girlie, when you closed that luscious coral mouth around the head of my prick, I became the most surprised and pleased man in Milwaukee and for miles around."
"You acted as though it felt good. You gasped and grunted and you pushed on my head to make me take it in deeper, but you pushed gently, I remember. You told me to use my tongue more, and when I did, and I felt you get all shaky, and your prick jump around in my mouth, I just tongued you more and more."
"Believe me, girlie, your little warm hand on my balls at the same time almost got you a mouthful of pearly-white jisum right then."
"So then we went backward to the preliminaries."
"I would have felt cheated if I had fucked you without first having had my hands full and my mouth full of your very pretty tits. Even back then, when you were seventeen, you had two terrific goonas, and they grow more terrific every year."
"You undressed me inch by inch. Oooh, didn't I like that! And kissed every inch as you exposed it. Oh, Hank, I can feel it now… oh Hank, when you ran little kisses from my breasts down along my belly and you flipped my clit just once with your tongue, just once, which left me ga-ga, and you whispered there'd be more later, oh… and you ran those little kisses down to my clit and back through my bush and you knew the right places where a girl wants her belly kissed and those jittery spots under the ribs, on the sides. And up to the tits again and then kissing my under my jaw and my chin while you played with my nipples, I… oh, Hank, I'm almost creaming in my pants, just remembering."
"Save the cream. I want to taste it. By the way, I have a room in this hotel. The restaurant is on the top floor. So this time we go down to my room instead of up."
"Oh, Hank, you have absolutely led me astray, tonight! But we're back when I'm a high-school girl eager to be led astray for the first time, because it wasn't fair to count my mad uncle. So. Where we we? You were putting your prick up between my breasts…"
"Which is a very special trick, limited to girls whose breasts are very firm and resilient. That's when you ought to envy the men, Helen. When they find a girl with tits they can press together and make a fuck-slot that is lined with breast tissue, because there is nothing like breast tissue to feel sliding along one's hard and happy prick."
"I remember how you slid your great big wonderful prick between my breasts as I pressed them together, and then I made a nipple rub along your prick and for a moment I thought you had fainted."
"Came close. The nerves can stand just so much."
"And right through my nipple, where it slid along your prick from the base up to the bottom of the head, and hit the kind of flange you have there, and slid back again, right through my nipple I felt the spasms in your prick and I felt how hard you were trying to stop yourself from sliding in and out there but you hardly could."
"You bet I hardly could stop. Wow, girlie, what you have there! Somehow I did stop, when one more slide would have zowied my balls into the squirt of the year. But I wanted more of you. To taste, to excite, to feel, to kiss, to lick, to caress. So I drew away."
"Not very far."
"Only down to your wet little cunt where I found that my tongue could have a lot of fun. And also I ran into a little fellow down there, the one they call the man in the boat."
"My clitoris. Oh, yes. Hank, a girl can do all sorts of things to her own itty-bitty-bumpy clit. She can tickle it and put an ice cube on it and put a vibrator to it and she can heat it and I've even heard, back there in the high-school locker-room is what we're talking about, when girls are at an age when they'll try anything for a sensation in the crotch, I've even heard of rubbing the clit with red pepper, but you have to be careful not to get any down into the cunt itself or you'll be sorry."
"Like liniment on a man's prick. The trick there is to dilute it till you get it just right, somewhere between a burn and a thrill."
"Well, I've just learned something. But oh, Hank, when you really tongued me down there I knew that nothing a girl could do to her clit, absolutely nothing, can equal the sensation of having a mouth and a tongue take care of working that clit up into its absolute peak of jittery jumping excitement."
"A man's tongue or a woman's tongue, Helen?"
"A man's, yours!"
"Very good. Well, there we were in that hotel room in Milwaukee and I knew I was going to have you for a hostess and I wondered how I could possibly wait while you got the schooling you needed. Let alone that you were only a highs school junior and you had to have your diploma before the school would let you in."
"But one day I would have you as a hostess in my plane. And then. Well, fuck and pilot. Pilot and fuck. But meanwhile I would have to wait, no getting around it. But meanwhile I had you in bed and I went kissing on down your legs and along your inner thighs and back to your cunt and up to your breasts again and nuzzled them and licked them and sucked those young sweet nipples till I got so hot I…"
"And got me so hot that I…"
"That I said, I'll he on my back and you'll sit on my prick and take it in and I want you to writhe around and make your tits shake so I can watch them while I fuck you upward. Which we did, and when you writhed around on my upright pecker that was getting so heated and juicy way up there in your absolutely terrific, tight twat…"
"I was a bit worried about making you come in that position because I still wasn't sure, when I was seventeen, how many times a man could come in a couple of hours, and I had to get back before my aunt got worried about me and I did want to feel your prick slam wham into me the downward way, with me on my back, because I had, oh, such an yen to feel you fuck me with all your weight behind it."
"Which I did, lovable child, not half an hour later. Hey wasn't I raring to go and slam down to the bottom of your sex department, come three-quarters of the way out, let you tickle the exposed part of my prick for a few seconds, and then I slammed down in again."
"Oh Hank, if I could only tell you how it felt when…"
Someone cleared his throat and said, "Excuse me, Captain Hastings, madam."
They looked up at the headwaiter who had a phone and a plug-in cord in his hand.
"Urgent call from O'Hare, Captain Hastings." O'Hare International Airport, of course. Chicago's pride, the busiest airport in the USA.
"Let's have it," said Hank Hastings resignedly.
"Hastings, here. Yes. Right. He broke his wrist? I see. Well, it can happen when a man goes to a health club. Oh. Absolutely nobody? But look, you see, I… Okay. On my way. Have the plane set to go and I can catch up on the schedule by riding the jet stream eastward."
Hank hung up.
"Yeh," he grunted. "Once in three years we have a shortfall on pilots and it had to be now. Off I go into the wide blue yonder."
"But Hank, our date!"
"I'm a pilot, Helen," he said.
That was all he had to say. She wasn't one of those dumb things who would attempt to interpose her yearning twat between a trained man and his duty. A gal might feel proud that her sexy attractions had kept a man fucking when he should be working, but too often, late, he got into trouble and she lost him.
Down in the hotel's driveway Hank shouted for the attendant to get two cabs. He put Helen into one and handed the driver a ten-dollar bill for a three-dollar trip. But he made the driver promise to see the lady right up to her door and wait till she had closed it and locked it.
"Oh, Hank," Helen said helplessly, and kissed him. "Where are you going?"
"London."
"When will you return."
"Don't know. But when I do, girlie, you and I have to take care of some very important unfinished business."
She was able to smile, then.