The long silence which ensued upon Marion’s quavering protests was broken only by the rasping sighs of the man and the softer and more plaintive sighs of the maiden. She now felt that her short lifetime of modesty and aloofness from carnal impulses had been transformed into burning, unformulated desires which wracked her. She realized that little by little her scant apparel was gradually slipping yet farther downward. Her arms had been entirely freed of the fabric now, the arm holes withdrawn over her hands. Upon a cream belly masculine fingers took a delicate pleasure.
For Stanley had so ensconced himself now between the extended and naked legs that he lay directly upon her body, and Marion was victim of the atavistic and age-old fires which burn within the human female when made to serve as bed for the male.
For an instant he knelt on the sand between the widely parted legs of the lass, and the instant sufficed for him to peel his bathing shirt over his head.
Marion, without opening her eyes, gasped as he lay once more upon her. For now she could feel clearly the mingling of their naked torsos, and the magical effect of the contact of their skins, of their bared bellies, led the girl, as well as the man, into ecstatic delight.
She shivered and clung to his neck as, relieving her of the weight she already adored to feel upon her body, he swept her breasts, her velvet belly, with his own nudity. With gently fumbling fingers he pressed still farther downward the crumpled band of silk which still clad Marion and also the short trunks which constituted all his own remaining attire. And it was upon the full, wee mound of her sex, upon the uncovered grove of silken ringlets which adorned that mound, that he pressed now not only the crisp forest of his own secrecies but the naked and rampant rod which had already fired the girl to frenzy and threatened the utter rout of her chastity.
Between her legs she felt the light swaying of a sack whose nature she did not fully comprehend. And, even though a slip of silk still covered her wee cleft, it seemed to her that she felt the heat of that naked sack through the fabric.
Relying upon the trembling, weakened state of his young sister-in-law-conscious that she now shared his own fires to the full even in her ignorance and innocence-Stanley crouched over her somewhat higher and offered himself the sensual joy rubbing his huge erection over the tender, heaving young belly.
But with this maddening contact savored to the full, the appalled instincts of all her native purity collected their forces for one effort more in behalf of chastity. To Marion this would mean only one thing: she was to be used-nay, she was being used-as a woman is used by a man.
“Spare me, spare me!” she half-sobbed, and, writhing beneath his covering body, she managed the supreme effort necessary to turn herself upon her face.
“Why, you silly, sweet, darling little wretch!” cried Stanley and he fell upon the white satin of her bared back with gentler kisses as he sensed more fully her dismay. “Did you actually think I was going to be false to my pledge when you have so loyally sustained yours? You’re shivering, blessed baby: What did you think I was going to do to you?”
“I thought-oh, I thought you were going to-take me!” quavered Marion, her golden head buried in her arms. “When you had us both all bare that way.”
“Never!” he cried impulsively.
And then he modified his pledge: “That is, never unless both you and Mildred actually urge it and unless your sister agrees that it will do no harm for you to have the pre-marital experience that so many of our unwedded girls have had.”
She gave a little choked cry. “Then it will be never,” she quavered. “But, Stanley, how can you keep referring to all this as merely ‘kissing’ when you know very well that you-that we-are acting most atrociously?”
“Kissing-and spooning-and a little petting-“ he maintained. “Just a sweet, feverish enjoyment for both of us and with no evil effect whatever.”
He was gloating over the silken expanse of her small and perfect back and shoulders. For the maiden was nude to the loins in the rear as she had been in front.
He kissed the smooth skin in a dozen spots. His lips lay tenderly on the dimples which were revealed just above the crumpled fabric of the bathing suit. His palms smoothed the white, soft sides. And Marion, sighing and vibrating anew, had no word of expostulation.
Suddenly he saw her tremble violently and heard her moan softly. And he noted that his swaying member was touching ever and again her exquisite flesh and that the effect of this recognizable contact was maddening to the girl.
Raising the elastic cord of his trunks, he covered his virility. “As I told you,” he whispered,” kisses may be applied with more than the lips-with tender fingers, with skin touching skin. And you must not be too quick to blame yourself or both of us. For I tell you, precious sister, that such joys as we are sharing are indulged in with no qualms whatever by these cultured, highly bred young people of our set. Maidens and youths, young wives and husbands, have lain naked in each other’s arms in this very hollow in the moonlight and in many another spot on this beach. And they permit themselves ‘everything but that’ in the way of pleasures. And they take no thought whatever of whether it is their own mate or fiance who is with them, since a new body always has its added charm of mystery and delight.”
“Stanley, dearest, it’s inconceivable, what you tell me!” cried the maiden. “But surely they must be very common wretches-in spite of a veneer of refinement!”
“Not at all,” he declared. “They are what we are accustomed to regard as the flower of our civilization, for you know that none but a chosen few can even get into this colony. But they simply decline to be bound any longer by rigid conventions which have deprived us of many many, hours of happy dalliance in the past.”
“Yet certainly,” she argued, turning her lovely flushed face sideways to allow him a quick kiss upon her lips as his snuggling mouth mutely quested it, “certainly they cannot always restrain themselves-can they-from-from actual unfaithfulness to marriage vows or to betrothal pledges?”
He smiled, just a shade grimly.
“They cannot,” he admitted. “And this moon which is looking down on us now has seen things which would make mere marital infidelity seem as innocent as rosebuds by comparison. Infidelity is frequent, to be sure, but, since in the very next hollow in the sand, hubby may be doing likewise with wifey’s intimate friend, wifey fears no wracking reproach for giving herself entirely. But many of our friends (married or unmarried) pride themselves upon the fidelity and determination with which they have avoided normal penetrations of the body. Yet, in this avoidance, they succumb to perversities for the sake of the spasm, perversities which make the moon draw a cloud over its shining face and which would seem to you entirely incredible if I essayed to describe them.”
Marion shuddered but her imagination was unable to apprise her in the least of his meanings. It did not, nevertheless, fail to inform her gentle pressures had so lowered the suit beneath her loins in the rear that some inches of the crevice between her buttocks must be very indecently revealed, for his lips were straying between pauses in his words and she could feel a moist and very perturbing tongue softly licking along that shameful crack.
As she sent a small hand to repair the indelicate exposure in her rear, the slender wrist was gently grasped and the fingers rendered impotent, while, very slowly, the unveiling of the upper slopes of those snowy buttocks continued.
“I beg of you, Stanley, for the sake of heaven!” she cried softly. “Can’t you see that you are making me shudder with shame?”
“The shame, my darling, is an aphrodisiac-not that you are in need of one” he replied. Nevertheless, he refrained from further revelations of her almost denuded person-and he pillowed his cheek luxuriously upon the nearly naked backside.
Struggling for self-control, Marion ended by tacitly acquiescing in being thus used as a pillow, while her soft thighs and her silken back were gently caressed by his wandering fingers. “But surely you and Mildred, at least,” she murmured as remembered his previous amazing disclosures, “do not yield to these shameful promiscuities.”
“Mildred is a young and adorable rogue,” he said. “She loves to pester and excite these young chaps by showing this and that, usually as if by chance, and then smiling cooly upon them when they manifest agitation. Her marvelous breasts-worthy rivals even of yours, Maro-almost broke up a social gathering the other day when she showed them playfully, offering me non-existent sustenance from them.”
“My dear!” gasped Marion. “I should think you would have expired of shame and indignation-and have beaten her or something.”
“That cave-mannish stuff is a bit outmoded,” smiled her brother-in-law. “Though Mildred enjoys a simulacrum of it at times. And she is nothing loath to whack me sometimes in a little game she has invented in which I play the role of her child instead of her husband, until a certain moment in the proceedings. There are girls here, though, who like nothing so much as to be shamefully and painfully flogged under condition of the utmost possible indecency-and by persons with no right whatever over them.”
“Good heavens, I certainly can’t comprehend that!” cried the maiden. “Did you speak to Mildred about what we were talking of yesterday-letting that Gerry Crandall into her boudoir, I mean and letting him raise her bare foot to kiss it, exposing her terribly while doing so?”
“I did,” replied Stanley placidly. “And we both laughed heartily about the way in which his eyes had bulged and his face reddened and-well-another symptom of his state which was quite manifest.”