Lady Behind The Wall

"For a month now. The good ones, they don' want to work this far out from the city. The ones that would move here, mostly they can't cut a straight line. An' here I am wit' three ladies comin' in the next hour for a perm, a trim, a touch-up an' a dye job, an' only me to do it all! Why? You know someone, maybe, Johnny?"

By way of reply, I motioned for him to switch off his clippers and took out my cellphone. Deirdre picked up when she heard my voice.

"Darling, if you were serious about looking for a job, throw on something suitable and get on down here to Antony's Unisex Hair Salon." I gave her the address, adding, "There's a county atlas in the top drawer of the phone table. It's just down the street from Bert's Place on Main, you can't miss it."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. Hurry." I hung up. Antony resumed cutting.

"That Cherokee girl you've been writin' to, that you asked me about the hairstyle magazine information for?" he finally said. "The one wit' the major yabbos an' the hair down to her butt?"

"Yes. We're together now. She's a fully trained cosmetologist, licensed in Texas and Nevada. That good enough for you?"

"The license, yes. We'll have to see about the rest." He finished my haircut, frowning thoughtfully. A few minutes later, Deirdre's Delorean pulled into his parking lot. She walked confidently into the salon. Antony had just finished dusting me off. He looked her over.

She was worth looking at. She'd wrapped her braided hair around her head and pinned it into place with a couple of crystal hairpins which stuck up from the back of her head in a way suggestive of eagle feathers. She wore no makeup save lipstick, and no perfume. Her blouse was opaque white and three-quarter sleeved, and while it completely concealed her boobs it could not disguise them. An indigo linen business skirt cut full enough to permit easy movement struck just above the knee, and bare legs disappeared into her Charles Jourdan flats. She carried a small professional bag.

I performed the introductions. Antony continued to study her. At last he said, "I can see what he sees in you, but damned if I know what you see in him. I think you can do better than him. Take me, for example. I can set you up in a nice place, quiet, a nice big bed, see you a couple of nights a week..."

Deirdre smiled as I bridled, but it was her play to call. "A lover I've already got. I came down here because I heard you have a desperate need for a good stylist that swings both ways."

"You talking about haircutting or fornicating?"

"Which are you better at?"

Antony pulled his hand back, shaking it as if to throw the blood off the fingertips from that last sally. He looked at me with a smile.

"Oh, she's good, Johnny. She just might do. I'll give her a *"

Motors were heard in the parking lot and doors slammed as three of the town's matrons got out of two cars, the social arbiter types you find in every small town whose delusions of youth have long outlasted the realities of time and mirrors. Antony pointed to a closet.

"Fresh smocks in there. You got tools?"

By way of reply, Deirdre held up her professional bag.

"Bene. They'll be here in a minute. Go get changed." He headed for the front door to greet them and buy her an extra minute or two. I looked at Deirdre, still fuming a bit from Antony's flirting with my lady.

"You think you can handle him?"

She chuckled as she shrugged into a smock. "John, I was fending off wolves worse than him from the time I went to college, to say nothing of my stage days. But it's sweet of you to worry." She gave me a quick but unhurried kiss. "Go on home, darling. I'll be along in awhile. And I promise not to drink anything stronger than coffee. Go on, now." She gave me a little push and taking the hint, I left after dropping the money for my haircut on the cash register.

It was almost 9:00 before Deirdre walked up from the garage. I noticed her kit was not in hand. She slipped into my lap and I set down my drink to fill my hands with something much more enjoyable.

"So how did it go?"

"Those ladies aren't what you call daring when it comes to their hair. Strictly routine stuff. After we finished with them, Tony took me out for a bite and some talk. He wanted me to work on commission. I wanted straight salary plus overtime, two weeks paid vacation, and health and dental coverage. He acted like I'd stabbed him in the heart and was drinking his lifeblood. I told him that I might be a woman, but I wasn't a fool. He grinned; he could tell I know the way guys like him play the game. We settled in for a good haggle. We went back and forth for two cups of coffee.

"We finally settled on straight salary plus tips, health coverage with optical but no dental, paid sick days and vacation to be negotiated. I start tomorrow, 8 AM to 5 PM, with hours to be adjusted in a couple of weeks. As of tomorrow, I am officially employed again!"

"Congratulations!" We kissed. Our kiss lengthened and heated. After a few minutes of kissing and caressing, I whispered in her ear, "What would you like to do to celebrate?"

She found my cock and began to stroke it slowly through my jeans. "What do you think?"

I shifted myself and picked her up. Carrying her up the front stairs was a good cardio workout, but the one we gave each other in the bedroom afterwards was even better.

*****

As simply as that, we settled into domesticity. We worked out a routine, with Deirdre usually making breakfast and packing me a lunch before I headed off to the current project. I would start supper and have it ready or nearly so when she got home from a hard day at the salon. Our schedules left us with lots of time together, of which we took full advantage to pleasure each other every day. Neither of us could remember a time when we'd been so content.

I had a few friends over for dinner, one couple at a time. To my relief, Deirdre got along well with all of them. Tasha and Richard, Johann and Bella (who to my surprise had become an item and were talking about moving in together), Antony and Maria, and Charlie and Ruth all accepted both her and the fact of us. I haven't many close friends and I was pleased they all liked her.

Weekends when I was not on call were often spent in my bass boat, fishing rods in hand, stalking the wily largemouth bass; or out on the farms of friends hunting varmints and learning the patterns of the local deer. Deirdre wasn't afraid to bait her own hook or clean her own fish, and was as at home cooking over a campfire as in the kitchen. The fact she, like me, could hit what she pointed at and would not take a shot she wasn't sure she could make filled me with respect for her prowess. She in turn appreciated my respect for the spirits of the animals we hunted and that like her ancestors I used every bit of the animal I could. Evenings in our tent or out under the stars were much more fun with two, as well.

She fit right in at the company Fourth of July party. It wasn't until I saw her greeting Charles, my Executive Vice President and his wife that I realized why. Her father having been an Army officer, she would have learned from him and her mother the fine art of entertaining as a means to advancement. The rules for such things in the military are not exactly the same as for the business world, but they're close enough. You figure out the hierarchy and fit your reactions appropriately. For once I enjoyed playing the host.

One weekend in August, it was driven home to me that it was time for me to divulge a couple of secrets I'd kept from my darling. It started with her looking at the electric bill one Saturday as I was proceeding with the monthly ritual of the household accounts.

"John, this bill does not make sense. It says we owe the power company $20 and change. That can't be right! The heat pump has been running hard for the last week in this heat spell and the pool constantly recirculates. You said the house is thoroughly insulated and I know the overhead fans help, but twenty bucks for a month? That's impossible! You better call them and have them check their readings, or next month we'll get hit with a four figure bill!"

I got up from the table and stretched. Looking out the window, I saw it was a cloudy day and switched on the Weather Channel. Deirdre started to speak but kept her peace as I held up a hand. The bottom line was that a tornado watch was posted for a dozen counties, including ours. I shut off the TV.

"I can show you the answer to our electric bill and make a check on the system at the same time. Let's throw on grubby clothes and boots."

She gave me a look, but didn't argue when we went upstairs. I put on a well worn pair of coveralls and hiking boots. She got into her hunting clothes and boots, adding her field belt with its survival kit and hunting knife. Exiting via the pool door to the cellar, I plucked a utility belt from its hook and buckled it on.

We took a trail northeast of the house for about a quarter of a mile that ended at a large wind turbine sitting on a small hillock. The big blades turned lazily in the low breeze. Deirdre raised her eyebrows.

"This is the first part of the reason we don't pay much to the power company for electricity. I put it in about six years ago when the government offered decent tax credits to any homeowner who would install one. Most of the time it generates enough to run the house without having to pull from the gird. In fact, there are times it makes enough juice that the power company has to buy it from me at the going rate and I turn a profit. But when we get a heat wave like we've had the last three weeks or so, the prevailing winds die down and it doesn't always produce enough to support the house. Wait here; I'll be back in a minute. I just want to check a couple of things."

I picked the set of rungs farthest from the rotor and climbed to the platform where the generator was. It did not take long to check things as I do this every couple of weeks. Everything was in good order. I closed and locked the access port and descended. The clouds to the west were lowering and turning a gunmetal gray I did not like at all. Deirdre looked at them and apparently reached the same conclusion I had. We didn't talk as we trotted back to the house. I felt better once we were in the basement level. Hanging up the belt again, I led her down the seldom-used utility corridor.

"I thought that wind generator belonged to the farm down the road, that they used it to pump deep well water or something like that."

"No, it's mine. Ours, now. It runs all the time and sends its juice through here." I stopped at a door with a "Warning– High Voltage" sign and worked the pushbutton lock. I motioned her inside. She looked at the racks of energy cells that filled the room and the power converters that sat on the floor, along with the meters and recorders that tracked how much current flowed which way and when.

"This looks like something out of a submarine movie," she murmured, examining one of the power cells.

"Very astute of you. They're standard submarine power cells. The Navy was scrapping thePlungersand thePermitswhen I decided to get off the grid and go green. I got them at a very favorable price, along with the necessary converters and control equipment.

"One problem people who want to achieve energy independence on the personal level always discover after putting up the wind generators and solar panels is making electricity is easy, but storing it is not. Mostly they use banks of truck batteries and try to keep power consumption to a minimum. I simply figured that the Navy had more experience at safely storing large amounts of electricity for future use than anyone else, being as the atomic submarine didn't come along until fifty-odd years ago. Before that, they used diesels to turn generators to make power that was stored in batteries designed to drive subs weighing thousands of tons. Why reinvent the wheel? It was just luck that some late model Navy storage cells came on the surplus market when I was ready to buy *"

An alarm horn hooted and the fluorescents overhead went out, red lights coming on in their place. I grabbed Deirdre's arm as my blood ran cold.

"Come on!" I ordered, dragging her out of the battery room and down the passage to what looked like a storage closet.

"John, what's happening?" she asked.

"No time!" I opened the closet and shoved her inside, crowding in after her. A light came on overhead. I took hold of a coat hook, twisted it, and gave the back wall a push. The back wall opened onto a small platform. I pushed Deirdre onto it and closed the door. Handing her a flashlight from the rack next to the door, I said, "Now we climb down. Follow me."

I went down the ladder to the bottom, getting off onto a pierced steel plate platform opposite a round hatch. I spun the locking wheel and it opened. I motioned her ahead of me.

"Crawl ahead about 15 feet and ease your way to the floor. You come out about three feet off the ground, so be careful." Deirdre obeyed without a word. When I saw her light well on its way, I climbed inside and pulled the hatch shut, spinning the inside wheel to secure it behind me. I squirmed my way to the far end of the tunnel, felt my way down to the floor, and from long practice found the light switch. Overhead, fluorescent screw-in bulbs lit. I closed and dogged the inner hatch before going to Deirdre, who was standing next to a table in the middle of the room. I took her in my arms and she clung to me, trembling.

"John, what is this place?" she asked.

"A souvenir of the Cold War recycled to reflect modern conditions, I guess you could call it." I led her to the small leather couch I'd brought in and reassembled a couple of years ago, the last time I'd upgraded the place. We sat, me holding her. I set our lights on the floor.

"You know Father built his dream house in 1961. That was the height of the Cold War, when the government was propagandizing about how people could survive an atomic war if they prepared for it. While the house plans were still on the drawing board, he modified them to include this fallout shelter. He equipped it to maintain eight people in reasonable comfort for six months. Or as I think of it, 1,440 man-days divided by however many people. Vitamins, condensed food, dehumidifiers, power cells and hand-crank generators to charge them, air filters, clothing, weapons, a deep well and water filtration, the whole nine yards for survival.

"He also intended it as a storm cellar in case of tornados or as a refuge from what the government quaintly refers to as 'civil disorder,' like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina– a panic room built before the term existed. I think that's why he was so cute with the access door in the closet. I know it's why he put blind dogs on the inner hatches down here. But the bottom line is when the tornado alarm sounds, don't dawdle. Grab everyone in the house and get 'em down here, and stay put until the storm is past.

"Beatrice told me when I was little that Father kept her and the family down here for four whole days during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those round hatches came out of a scrapped submarine. They'll stand up to anything short of plastique or an acetylene torch. We're safe here."

"How do you know when it's safe to come out?"

I gestured to the wall to our right. There was a bank of instruments, a computer, a radio console that had come out of a merchant ship that could work the entire radio spectrum and a shelf with a TV set.

"You check over there. The computer can tie into the house security system and tell you if intruders are inside. You can tie into the exterior security cameras and see what's happening in the immediate vicinity, too. The instruments tell you the temperature, wind speed and direction, air pressure and radioactivity. You can also connect to the Web if you want to. Let's see what's happening." I sat in the operator's chair and slid over to the computer, Deirdre hanging over my shoulder.

"The base setting is monitoring the house sensors. House is clear ... let's see what the cameras can tell us."

There are eight external cameras in my household setup. The default 8-screen appeared. Seven of the pictures were the usual. The eighth showed movement and I clicked onto it.

A funnel cloud was moving from left to right. A quick glance at the instrument pack showed wind speed over 80 knots and barometric pressure bottoming out. From what landmarks I could see through swirling leaves and debris the tornado was north of us, following the state highway that was Main Street. We watched, fascinated by this outlaw force of nature. A warning beep sounded, and a light on the power panel changed from green to amber. Another went red, while a third green light came on and a gauge lit.

"What was that?"

"The wind generator just shut down and feathered its blades. It's programmed to do that when the wind speed exceeds safe parameters. No power is coming into the house, meaning the commercial power lines are down somewhere. We're on battery power now, we're drawing from the power room in the basement. If we were down to the juice in the shelter's power cells, that light would be red."

The tornado passed out of frame and I got up from my chair. Deirdre took my hand and brought it to her breast, smiling as I took the hint and began to caress her.

"I take it we're going to be down here for awhile?" she asked.

"Discretion is the better part of valor," I agreed, gently squeezing her tit. "We should stay here until we're sure the storm has passed."

Her hand dropped to my zipper, pulling it down and slipping inside to find my erection waiting for her touch. "No phones, and no one knows about this place. Total privacy in complete safety. It's like we're the last people in the world after an apocalypse. We have a duty to the human race, darling. I want to feel you inside me. I need you to fuck me. Take me! Take me hard, like a man takes his woman! Take me now!"

I pulled her to me and kissed her hard, simultaneously working the buttons on her shirt. She returned my kiss passionately, her hands shoving her pants down so she could step out of them as I yanked her shirt down her arms and dropped it to the floor. Pulling her to me, I kissed her mouth and moved on down to her boobs, sucking the hard nipples into my mouth, hearing her moan with her need. She worked my zipper and got her hands inside my coverall, nails scratching as I suckled her tits and pulled her ass to me. Suddenly she pushed me away and bent over the arm of the sofa, legs spread, looking over her shoulder at me.

"Don't play games with me! I need you now! Take me! Please! Now! Please!"

I stepped behind her beautiful ass, seeing her pussy waiting for me, glistening pink, ready to be fucked. Shucking out of my coveralls, I grasped her hips and eased forward. Deirdre didn't wait. The moment she felt my cockhead penetrate her, she thrust backward, taking me deep into her cooze.

"Yes! That's what I want! Fuck my pussy, darling! Fuck my pussy! Give it to me hard! I'll take it all! Fuck me and make me cum for you, John! Fuck me hard!"

We quickly established a rhythm, simple, deep strokes of my cock into her willing cunt, my balls slapping her rump with every thrust. Deirdre didn't want me to be gentle. She didn't want me to use any of the lovemaking techniques I'd learned from her, from Cleo, or from any women I'd ever bedded. She had reverted to Primitive Woman, a cavegirl like Raquel Welch in 1 Million Years B.C. or Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire. She wanted to be taken by a dominant male, without subtlety, even brutally; to be used hard and long for his pleasure. I gave her what she wanted, listening to her as we screwed, utterances forced out of her at cockpoint.