Louise lay limp and naked upon the bed, drenched with sweat, semen and piss. She was fucked beyond endurance. She could not have cared who saw her then, obscene and spent. Her mouth was open. A trickle of saliva ran from it down her cheek, joining the tears she had involuntarily shed in the moment of her great coming. Her hair, matted and wildly disarrayed, lay across her face and across her pillow. Hector looked down at her, proud and possessive, and no whit disgusted at the sight. So might a hunter look down at some denizen he has just shot in some jungle. He grinned, triumphantly.
But Louise, eyes closed, slumped grotesquely in abandon. She lay, blissfully content to surrender utterly to the tide of satiation in which she had been engulfed.
And Hector's penis, bowed by the onslaughts that had been demanded of it, lay subsided against the hairs of his lower belly. Truce had been called. The lovers, as if by mutual consent, had ceased their striving. The one lay, relaxed and waiting. The other lay, mauled and beaten into submission.
Long moments ticked by in the silence of that April noon.
Hector looked down at his wife, but she did not stir. Nor was she asleep. From time to time a long, low, throbbing moan of pleasure escaped from her lips, and she shivered as the memory of the fuck swept through her again.
She was beautiful, Hector thought, the most beautiful woman in France. In France? In the world, then! And unquestionably, she must be the finest fuck ever created by a just God for the delight and delectation of man.
Becoming thirsty after his exertions, he crossed silently to where his gown hung, then tiptoed to an anteroom, where he rang for champagne.
The slight pop of the cork as it left the bottle disturbed Louise, lost in the luxury of reverie bringing her back once again to reality.
Sleepily, she reached for her husband, thinking him still at her side. Then she called: "Hector? Where are you?"
Gowned, with his hair combed, Hector came into the bedroom bearing the champagne and glasses.
"Here I am," he grinned, "bringing sustenance from the very Gods. Oysters, caviar, eggs, food from the sea."
She sat up, a statue suddenly come to life as her splendid breasts arched out once more from where they had lain pancaked upon her chest. Gratefully she reached out a hand for her glass, and they drank his toast: "To our reunion."
"Was it very lovely?" he coaxed, tenderly searching in her eyes.
"It was so wonderful," she murmured. "What a lover you are, my Hector!"
"You say nice things to your Hector."
"Because my Hector does nice things to his Louise."
"And are you over it now?"
Louise stretched out, luxuriating in the tension she placed upon her naked, youthful, nubile body. "If a girl ever gets over what you've just done to me, then I expect I am."
They drank again, sipping the golden fragrance of the wine. Hector placed the bottle in its ice-bucket beside the bed. He sat on her side of the bed, his gown falling open. He left it so. "What'll be left in it for me?" he asked.
Louise gazed down upon his penis, flaccid and limp where it flopped there against his thighs, his balls hidden between his legs.
"With that?" she taunted.
"Fear not, my sweet. It can rise again. Phoenix, you once used to call it."
"Don't I know! Seriously, love, have your will of me. I'm sure I could never come again. But I'll do whatever you want me to. What woman wouldn't, after what you've just done for me?"
Hector passed that one. He knew a hundred women who, their own satisfaction attained could be cruel in their selfish ingratitude. But thank God he thought, Louise is not like that.
"Suppose I should like to have intercourse, there, right between your two breasts?" he questioned.
Louise cupped each tit in her palms, squeezing the breasts together until they met in a straight-up-and-down cloven valley.
"Like this?" she asked coyly, lifting a provocative eyebrow. "Then go ahead, my love, you shall."
And Hector, knowing her generosity, was satisfied.
"Have you missed me so very much, then?" he asked, as he refilled their glasses.
"More than you know."
She reached out a hand, tickling at his flaccid penis, sending fingers questing along his thighs for his balls, feeling the surging manhood asserting itself once more in her husband. She herself remained unperturbed, intent only upon bringing gratification to Hector, since his mead of pleasure to her had been so unselfishly given.
Skillfully and with practiced fingers, she masturbated him gently, persuasively, glorying at the accumulation of spunk that each forward motion of her hot palms deposited among her fingers.
"Nice, my love?" she whispered.
Hector groaned in pleasure, surrendering his penis completely to her practiced manipulations. Oily pre-come welled out from the orifice at the end of his reddened cock, swollen there upon its staff, looking like some London policeman's helmet.
Louise put her glass down beside Hector's and swiveled over, not relinquishing her grip on his rod but latching again over that joyous staff with her eager, hot-tongued mouth.
The accumulation of spunk grew so that, eventually, it frothed over her lips.
Hector raised her head quickly, pulling her by force off his cock, and greedily sucked at her mouth in a long fuck-kiss, to regain for his own pleasure the juices that had come from his agitated penis.
She gave him all she had accumulated, feeling it pass from her tongue to his, and sank back to suck him off. She could feel that he was close to coming. Never once, therefore, did she relinquish the terrible onslaught of her mouth, skillfully drawing the very manhood from between his loins.
And then Hector went rigid.
He was coming. His orgasm was upon him.
It was as if he had been suddenly removed into another world as he felt spurt after spurt of white, hot juice jet into his wife's throat.
She, feeling it come, was delirious with happiness, sucking and licking so that not a drop of it should spill, draining his very knackers.
Hector burst into a sweat, but dared not move until his semen was spent, delighting in the feeling of limpness that was markedly stealing over him as discharge after discharge of milky, full-bodied semen emptied from him.
Louise came slowly off him, a trickle of come welling from her mouth and down her lovely throat. Her lips were shut, containing the still-warm ejaculation; suddenly and greedily she opened her throat and swallowed the entire load she had sucked from his prick.
"Ah," she groaned happily, feeling it slide down her gullet. "And there are those who set champagne above this, the fools! The Philistines! What know they, who only champagne know?"
Hector watched her exultation, loving it. Slowly his penis subsided, until it lay flaccid. He reached for his glass. And Louise spoke then.
"Nice, my beloved?"
"Indescribably lovely," he said fervently.
And after a long pause, Louise asked: "And have you, too, missed me?"
"So very much."
And he meant it. In silence they drank from refilled glasses, then Hector collapsed and lay supine beside her.
"No mistresses, then, since we were last together, my Hector?"
He cocked a quizzical eyebrow at his wife.
"No mistresses," he lied, blandly. "What about you? Any lovers?"
This time, Louise took him completely by surprise.
"One lover," she said.
It was a blow right into the pit of Hector's stomach. But not by an eyebrow's twitch did he betray it. The flat admission stunned him, until he remembered the outright lie he had just told his wife when he had denied having any mistresses. Mistresses there had been – ships of the night, and scores of them – since he had seen her last.
Instead, he parried her admission.
"And why not?" he asked, gently. "Poor thing! I'm away so very often from you. And you are so very much, so completely, woman!"
"That's just it, Hector. Woman. Not oversexed. At least I don't think so. But just woman. And this time, when you were away for so long, when for so long I had wanted you, there came suddenly the chance for intercourse with somebody. It was just a quick, plain and simple fuck. The chance offered. I yielded."
Hector grinned. His first shock had subsided. Of course, the crazy way they lived, the long separations – of course she would take a lover. The miracle was that she had lived without one for so long, for six long years. Or so she confessed, anyway. This demanded adjustment. If she were to be deprived of her husband for such long periods, was it her fault? It would be cruel to deny her, the splendid Louise, of all women, the right to sex, to deny her the right to copulation when and where she might choose to effect it.
"I'm glad you told me," he said, understandingly.
"So am I," she said. "Look, Hector. My job takes me away from you for too long at a time. Then, when I can be settled for a while, you are gone. Soon as we meet, I have to shuttle halfway round the world again – the glamorous, globe-trotting beauty consultant to the House of Pierre. It's true, we make wonderful money. We live in the best of hotels. But one thing is lacking most of the time. That thing is sex."
"Love – that I know I have. For your love, my darling, I am grateful. You are the most wonderful man I know. You are all I want. When I can have you. But I loathe going to bed with my whole body aching for just one thing – a man between my thighs."
"My heart aches for you. That's one thing. But my body ache, which happens, you know…?"
"For a penis?" he asked.
"That's just it. For a penis. Any penis. For a man just to fuck me until I collapse, like you do. That, Hector, is another sort of ache altogether."
"I see," said Hector gravely. "So?"
"So I want your permission to take a lover when I want one. Look, Hector, every time I ask you, you tell me: 'No mistresses'. But I don't believe you. You couldn't be the man you are to me, if you weren't often, well at least half that man, to other women."
Hector lay back, realizing the conviction underlying her words. She knew he had had mistresses – scores of women chosen only for the gratification they could give him for the nights in which he had taken them to his bed.
Softly, he said: "My darling – and hell, I hope this isn't going to hurt you – you're right. There have been mistresses."
To his surprise she accepted his admission as casually as if he had told her there had been games of tennis.
"So you see," she said, "we have to rationalize about this thing. There is some reasonable concession we have to make, the one to the other, some tolerance we have to show."
"I suppose we have to. O.K. then. In principle, I'm prepared to go along with you. But tell me first, this lover of yours. Where did you have him? In Australia when you were there, or since then?"
"Since then."
"In Switzerland?"
"No, Hector. Not Switzerland. Here. Right here in Nice. After six whole months of wet dreams, of masturbation after parties, after all the times I've longed for you, it was right here in Nice."
"When?"
Louise lied then.
"Does it matter? Just while you were away. That's as much as I will admit."
"Is he as good a lover as I have been?"
"Conceit!"
"But born of love. Of my love for you…"
"In that case, I'll allow it then. But Hector, this is 1960. These aren't the days of our youth any more. We – you and I – are worth a million pounds, perhaps. I've lost count. There is more than you or I could ever want. Still we persist in making more money. So what we have to do now is to plug up what could widen into a dangerous rift between us – sexwise, that is. This thing, this need of mine for sex, is something that's been growing on me for a long time."
From refilled glasses they drank again.
"You have any ideas then?" he asked her.
"Yes," she admitted. "Funny. It's only now that I've really crystallized them into words, now as I talk. And you had better like them, because you are going to be called on to live up to some of them."
"Listen. Nobody loves me like you do. To you alone will I utter this truth. There is no man so tender, so passionate, so strong, so capable. There is no man who can do to me just what you can in bed. And that's what you always tell me, that in bed I am supreme among all the world's women."
"It follows then that we need one of two things. Regular sex with each other, or just regular sex with anybody. I assume you've been getting regular sex with anybody, and I'm at precisely that stage now that I want it, too, if not with you, then at least with some other man, or even men, of my own choosing."
"So listen carefully. Because I don't want to do this behind your back. I propose to bring my lovers to you. I propose to strip and to get into action with them so that you can approve. Or disapprove. I would never take a man of whom you did not approve, Hector."
"But you, on your part, will bring your lovers to me, right before my eyes. I will approve of them. Some I will not permit to come into the same room as I am in, no doubt. But I will be sensible and try to avoid hating them for being your mistresses. If I approve, then it will be for all time."
"Lovers and mistresses, of course, who don't measure up – these we will abandon. That is to be understood."
"But then, Hector, when you go away, I'll at least know that I will have a penis to serve me, even if I don't have a husband. And that'll apply equally to you and your mistresses. You see, now?"
"Just like I've been doing all along then?" asked Hector, gently teasing.
"Just as you've been doing now, for six years and more," she said, then added firmly, "and as I want the right to do from now on."
Hector sat up, slapping his thigh.
"You know, damned if I don't think this whole thing looks like a mighty fair arrangement for us. We don't live like other people. So the hell with it. We won't love like other people either. It's revolutionary, but damned if I don't think it's just crazy enough to work. Now tell me, who is your lover? Is he here, perhaps, in Nice?"
"He is."
"Will we meet?"
"Certainly," she said levelly. "But only when you produce a mistress. I'm not going to give all and take nothing in this arrangement. Surely you have somebody here in Nice or close by whom you keep for when I'm not here with you?"
Hector, momentarily perplexed, thought suddenly of a woman called Claudine Ferrandi, Italian producer of plays and revues. She lived very much of her life in Nice. Claudine was a fine girl, in the fussy femininity of whose villa he had spent one or two tempestuous weekends from time to time.
"Oddly enough, yes I do," he confessed.
"Then we will bring them together, your mistress and my lover. Soon. The sooner the better. Agreed?"
"Without doubt, agreed," said Hector easily – and yet uneasily.