Fire and Ice

He had another drink on the train and was in the process of picking up an attractive young female commuter when his station was called and he had to study the possibilities, pro and con, tonight and tomorrow morning, before he bade the girl goodnight and got off the train. He hailed a taxi for the ride home, hand on his cock in the darkness of the back seat, smiling to himself over what had been another fine day, hoping Victoria would not altogether spoil his evening with her tears.

But he was very pleasantly surprised when, just as he was fumbling the key into the lock, the door opened and there was his wife, looking very nice indeed in demurely pink lounging pyjamas, blonde hair curled and fluffed, bright smile of welcome on her face. He almost swept her into his arms and kissed her, but was able to refrain from that by quickly thinking ahead to what that would lead to with her, and subsequently with Brenda.

"Cheers," he said. "Sorry I'm late, love. Had to stop with Peter and the boys for a drink or two. I suppose I should have called."

Victoria kissed him on the cheek, and said, "I don't mind, darling. I didn't wait long for you at the station. I thought it was business that made you late. No, that's a lie. I thought you stayed late because you were still angry over that silly fight we had this morning. I'm sorry about that, Sebastian. Are you still angry?"

"I can't even remember what it was we fought about," he said with a smile, but the smile faded and he turned away, for he could remember that his wife had picked up a boy, a student."What's for dinner?"

"Steak, baked potato with cheese and chives, and your favorite cherry pie for dessert. Would you like a Manhattan before dinner? I made a pitcherful for us."

"I've had enough already, and I'm damned hungry."

"They're good, a bit sweet, just the way you like them. I sampled them for us and I approve. Sure you can't handle just one drink?"

"Well, just one," he said as she helped him off with his coat.

"It stopped raining here hours ago, but it's still cold out. I've a nice fire going. Would you like me to serve dinner in the living room? That telly show you like is coming on in about twenty minutes."

"That'll be fine, Vick," he said, and bestowed a pat on her firm round little bottom before leaving her for the comfort of their living room.

Sebastian felt more than a little sorry for her. He still loved her, in his way, but more than that he felt sorry for her now. He was really ruining her life, all for some torrid new sex with a hot new woman. Poor Victoria, mired with guilt over her seduction of a boy that day, working like a slave to please him, while he was having a fine old time with her best friend. He was a bastard, an utter bastard to let that sort of thing happen. Let it happen? Lord, he'd practically forced it to happen. Flirting with Brenda over the months, dangling Victoria on a string, keeping her off balance to the point where she was doing crazy things while he enjoyed himself silly. Not right, was it? It really wasn't right, no matter how much he deserved some wild play after his years of hard work.

It was not right at all. Victoria was an attractive young woman, very good in bed, devoted to him and their home. Most men would cherish a woman like her forever, but Sebastian the bastard was casually driving her into the arms of other men and not really giving a damn about it because he knew he could have her back any time he chose to give a pull on the string that bound her to him. He hoped she had had a good time with the boy that morning, he really did, hut he knew his hopes were in vain. Certainly there might have been some fleeting excitement, just because of the novelty of it, the sin, but a mere boy could not satisfy a woman like Victoria. He told himself she needed strength, forcefulness, and the mature cock of a man like himself to keep her happy.

There by his favorite chair were his slippers. Substitute cherry for apple pie, and he was receiving the same treatment he had thought about that afternoon, the treatment he was tired of but could still appreciate. He would appreciate it now, and he would worry about his two women later. All day long, from morning till night, he had to make the decisions that involved thousands of pounds of his customers' money, sometimes their entire life savings, and now at the end of the day he was not about to make one more decision that was any more important than whether to turn on the telly now or in twenty minutes. And Victoria, good old reliable Victoria, even made that decision easier for him.

She came into the living room bearing the pitcher of cocktails and the iced glasses on a tray, looking just wonderful. Her pink- lipsticked smile was brilliant, and her blue eyes were sparkling. The lounging pyjamas fit her very well, molding her long, supple waist, her rounded hips, and her full, conical breasts. Sebastian could tell by the way her breasts bobbed, nodding yes at her every step, that she was not wearing a bra.

Probably no panties, either. Probably trying once again to heal their rift with the beautiful slim body she had been blessed with, and if she were not so close to Brenda, he would certainly take advantage of Victoria's unspoken offer. Never mind that he'd had terrific sex that afternoon; the drinks and Victoria's pink and blonde beauty had him itching for another go. Especially when she bent over and put the drink tray on the coffee table, standing in profile to him, smiling, and giving him a good view of her buttocks, round as a pair of footballs under the tight stretch material, as upraised as the questioning eyebrow of a Picadilly tart. He had to grit his teeth to keep from smiling back at her.

"Did you have a difficult day, dear?" she asked, serving him his drink and sitting down on the couch.

"I had an awful day," he said, and launched into a routine description of his work. He was happy he had chosen the chair to sit in. If he was on the couch beside her, he would not be able to keep his hand off her thigh, so slender and tapered and smooth under the thin pink covering. And her flat tummy, as flat as a girl's, and then it would lead to holding those firm young breasts in his hands, playing with them just as she liked, cupping each of them in both hands as he covered them with the kisses that always drove her slightly wild.

Slightly wild? Lord, when Victoria got going, she was wilder than Brenda, at least on the outside, But inside Brenda had it all over Victoria. Brenda could excite a man like him with just her smile, just the droop of one eyelid, and after four years of marriage to Victoria, he would need to have his hand on that firmly fat little fanny mound of hers to have the same results; he would have to kiss it to get as aroused as he had been that afternoon when Brenda was across the table from him, teasing him with her coat. But he did have an erection just from looking at Victoria now, and he felt that all that would be required from her at that moment would be the offer of her lips on his cock -- something she would never do -- to make things right between them this night and perhaps for a lot longer than that. As it was, he concealed his excitement admirably, droned on about work, concluded with, "Another day, another few pounds. You had better serve up the dinner if you want to see that show."

"Yes, my lord and master," Victoria said, and rose, came to him, bent low enough for him to look inside the opened bodice of her lounging pyjamas, and gave him a kiss whose slippery warmth more than made up for its brevity. His hand was just reaching up for her when she slowly drew back from the kiss, and his eyes never left her cunningly moving bottom as she left the room.

Sebastian turned on the television set. He tried to concentrate on the antics of his favorite video family and on the delicious steak Victoria had prepared for him. But his wife continued creeping into his thoughts. He tried not to look at her very available beauty, but he felt her presence strongly. A wonderful woman, really, and a damned good poke. If that student lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the lithe, supple, enthusiastic blonde who had seduced him. The trouble with the boy was that he had no sophistication whatever when it came to sex. Victoria herself had very little sophistication, but she must have seemed overwhelming to the boy. Sebastian suspected he could give his wife that sophistication, given time, but for the moment he had Brenda to save his energies for, and anyway, Victoria could be happy enough with the average unsophisticated bloke. Too bad he could not keep her as a pet, a cook, an occasional poke, and still have his Brenda for the far-out sex times he deserved. Well, maybe it could be worked out that way. Only time would tell. Full of steak and potato and alcohol, he was able to get drowsily involved in the silly problems of the people on the telly and successfully forget his own problems for a while.

Victoria had to wake him up at bedtime, and still she maintained her cheery smile and her bright and disturbingly bouncy demeanor. He got into his pyjamas and went to bed yawning, but his eyes came wide open when she came mincing out of their bathroom in a frothy little white nightie that he hadn't seen in a long, long time. Her walk was as saucy as her smile as she came to bed, and it was not easy at all for him to roll over and turn off the light.

"You had a nice long nap in front of the telly," she said, voice silken and soft in the dark.

"Uh huh."

"Think you can go to sleep again so soon?" she asked, and the bedclothes rustled as she moved closer to him.

"I can if you don't crowd me," he said shortly. When she had rustled over the other way, he added, "Sorry, darling, but I'm so tired I don't even know if I can get back to sleep. Have to try, though. Another tough day tomorrow."

"Sebastian, do you think we ought have a talk?"

"About what?"

"Well, us. Things just aren't going right for us, not in any way at all, not in bed or out of it."

"Christ, I can't be a sex maniac with you all the time. There are times in a man's life that he just can't, and this is one of them and it doesn't help talking about it," he said, lying there with an erection as big as he had ever had in his life, smelling his wife and feeling her warmth, but unable to do a damned thing about it, for now.

"I understand that, Sebastian, or at least I think I do. I think I'd understand it much better, though, if we talked with a doctor."

"There's nothing wrong with me," he said, sitting up in bed. "At least nothing serious. And I'm not going to see some stupid doctor. If you're so randy all the time, go down to the docks and pick up a sailor, but let me sleep!"

"Sebastian! What a thing to say!"

"Sorry," he said, and fell back on the mattress. "Just be patient. Things will work out."

She was crying, sobbing very softly in the darkness, and Sebastian had to lie there and suffer through it. He could not even put an arm around her to comfort her, could not even acknowledge that he knew she was crying or the first thing he knew he would be making love to her, and ruining things between Brenda and himself. But there was one thing he could do about it, and this he did.

He grumbled up out of bed, saying, "Now I can't sleep at all. I'm going to look at the telly for a while. I'll set the alarm in case I fall asleep in the chair. Sleep well, my darling. We'll talk about getting some help for our marriage later, when I'm feeling better."

He did just as he said he would do, but he set the alarm for three in the morning, for the time Brenda would get back home after having finished her shift at the club and helped close it up for the night.

Chapter 7.

Brenda was just pleasantly tired when she pulled her sports car into the driveway that night at a few minutes before three. She had not had a particularly hard night of it, and that had been of her own choosing. She had made at least a thousand pounds that day on Sebastian's manipulation of her option to buy some coffee beans, coffee beans she would never see, and with that sort of profit coming in, she did not have to put up with the things she had formerly engaged in at her little business in London. No more pervs and kinks for her, even if they did pay the good money. From now until the time she got her hooks into Sebastian really deeply, she would make her money at work by using her little devices and her little hands on the young sailor boys who could be so easily satisfied by an experienced woman like herself.

There was nothing like experience, in business and in sex. And she had been in the business of sex long enough to know the truth of that axiom. A Brighton call girl at eighteen, working the circuit at twenty, making so much money and so tired of play for pay by the time she was twenty-four, she had gone straight and paid dearly for it by marrying a man who was respectable in every way, in every way but one, and that one was that he was stuck where he was in job and in money. He had loved her to distraction, but there were more important things than love in the world, and so she had dumped him and taken up her old trade, at least a part of it, having the experience now to know how to please a client without using anything more than her sultry good looks and her hands. It wasn't a bad life she had. It beat the old, sometimes exciting days on the call-girl circuit, but she would have a much better life with a man with good financial potential tucked under her wing, a man like Sebastian, the next- door-neighbor man.

She parked the car in her garage and let herself into her house through the back door, She kicked off her high heels, leaned against the door to massage her tired feet for a few moments, and unzipped her green dress on the way to the bar in the dining room. The green chiffon clung to her shoulders as she mixed herself a good stiff whiskey and soda, and she took a drink from it and smacked her lips with gusto before slithering out of the dress and letting it fall to the floor.

Brenda took her drink into the kitchen and sat down at the table there, always a comfortable place for her. She felt that she was basically a homebody, a housewife at heart, one who loved nothing better than to putter around the house and enjoy tea talk with the other neighborhood housewives. Of course she could not do that now. Only Victoria was dumb enough to be her friend in the neighborhood, dumb enough to lose her husband to her. But there would be a time in the not too distant future when she and Sebastian would be living in a neighborhood a lot better than this, and Brenda's kitchen would be the meeting place for the other wives, just as her room in Brighton had been the meeting place for the other girls when the party time was over and the men were all properly relieved of their lusts and their currency. Yes, even with her rather tawdry background, she would fit in well as a housewife. All it would take would be a bit of patience and a bit of guile, and then the anxious waiting would be over and Sebastian the money man would be all hers. She was just reaching for the snap of her tight brassiere when a soft knock sounded at her back door, and she smiled, knowing that her patience was paying off again.

Of course she had lied to Sebastian about Victoria sucking that boy. victoria had done no such thing. A lie in a good cause, Brenda thought. All in the good cause of getting Victoria out of Sebastian's life as soon as possible.

She padded swiftly to the door, picked up one shoe and got it on her foot before she drew the curtain aside and peered out into the expectant face of Sebastian Spence, and registered delighted surprise. She let the curtain fail, rattled the doorknob while she got into her other high-heeled shoe, then opened the door enough for him to ease inside. He was wearing white pyjamas under his topcoat, and no sooner had she closed the door behind him than she had her hand inside his coat, fondling the long, cotton covered heat there, and her lips were on his mouth, sucking him inside her. She kept him pinned against the door with her breasts and her mouth and her hand, massaging his chest and sucking his tongue an& stroking his cock until she was absolutely certain this wouldn't be a five minute visit, and only then did she push herself back from him and give him the full sultriness of her welcoming smile.

"It must be telepathy," she said. "All night long while I was waiting on those soused businessmen and their secretaries, I was thinking about you and wishing you'd come slipping over here tonight just like to used to. You handsome darling, you're enough to take all the weary ache out of my body just like that," she said, and snapped her fingers under his nose and gave him another thorough going over with her mouth and her breasts and her hand.

"Can you stay long?" she asked, the words breathed warmly against his lips. "Is little Victoria asleep?"

"Like a rock," he said, hands moving over her lingerie-clad body, his cock oozing in her fingers.

"Good. And speaking of rocks, how do you want your drink, up or on the rocks."

"Just like you're having yours. But I'll get it. You've served enough drinks for one night."

"You make the investments, I make the drinks. Come into the bar with me, lover. You're cold as ice." She slipped her arm about his waist, inside his coat, inside his pyjama bottoms to guide him along at her side, smiling up at him, squeezing handfuls of his firm buttocks as he padded along in his slippers and she clacked along on her heels.

She took off his coat and perched him on one of the three leather-topped barstools, wedged her wide hips between his knees and kissed him again. While their mouths were merged, she took his cock out of his pyjamas and rubbed its wet head up and down and back and forth over the front panel of the sheer, tight, bikini-cut black panties she had on over her suspender belt. He trembled in his eagerness, hotter than blazes, and she liked that. It showed her exactly where she stood with him. His knees were shaking as they clasped her hips, and his hands were shaking as he plucked at the two nipples poking so provocatively out from the front of her bra cups. She had him panting hotly before she pulled away and went around to the other side of the bar.

"Tastes good," he said with a leer as she got out a pair of fresh glasses.

"My lipstick? I'll put on some more for you as soon as I build us some drinks. How did it go today?"

He shook his head. "Victoria's a sad case, I'm afraid. I still don't know what to do with her. It was all I could do tonight to keep from, well, at least trying to get together with her. She feels so awful, the poor girl, and she doesn't know what the devil's going on."

"You mean you got randy for her. Here's your drink. Cheers." Brenda regarded him evenly over the rim of her glass as he joined in her toast.

She had left her purse on the bar. She rummaged in it now for her lipstick. The light was dim, but she knew he could see each of h&r movements, every plane and shadow and coloration of her face and body very clearly, and she let him gaze his fill of her as she spoke, saying, "Listen, Sebastian, I know she's a damned attractive woman, and I know how randy you can get. But you know me, too, and you know it's absolutely over between us if you start making love to her again. It's up to you. Pick her or me. If it's me you pick, I don't care how many other women you pick up for one-night stands, but I won't have you making love to Victoria again or with any other woman on a steady basis. Well?" She stood in three-quarter profile to him, looking haughtily into her hand mirror as she smeared the glossy red on her lips.

"Don't rush me, damn it. It's been a long time for me and Victoria. I can't just dump her. I can't let her down that fast."