- 7 -
The Vaught Plantation - August 5th, 1952 - 11:11pm

“You can’t sell the Vaught estate,” Elizabeth said with every bit of cold bile she could muster. “You don’t own the Vaught estate.”

Gregory chuckled from his shadows. “No, but neither do you. Your name is on the deed right beside Abby’s. And neither of you own it outright. The debt of this place is still a mile deep.”

Elizabeth hated the way the man’s rumbling voice excited her. She hated the lurid story of how her sister had jerked him off with some obscene glove. She hated that she’d spent that portion of his story imagining her body covered in the stuff, glimmering as she rubbed her squeaky body along Gregory’s hard cock. She squirmed and shifted as she listened to his story alternating between trying to find a line of salvation and simply stewing in her own lusts. The room remained thick with the scent of whiskey and smoke, but the other, the scent of Gregory, choked her and made it hard to breathe if she focused on it too long. “Irrelevant,” she said. “From the sound of it, we are on the same side anyway. This Flensing man apparently knew about Benny’s trollop. So you have as much incentive to castrate that bastard as I do.”

“It would seem that way,” Gregory agreed. “Maybe if you’d left it to me, things might have worked out differently. But, you didn’t. You put your own meddling agent in the middle of things. Alice wasn’t idle. And Benny. Well, he was just being himself, I suppose.”

The Apartment, Washington D.C. - July 31st, 1952 - 11:37 a.m.

The apartment key was both comforting and annoying. Whenever he was away from his rendezvous spot, he sometimes thought it stung him in his pocket. He kept it with him like a talisman to ward off the bleak edges of his life. If Elizabeth knew what it was and what it represented to him, she might actually attempt to force feed it to him. She didn’t though. She’d remained entirely unaware of Melanie, their secret place, and their love. It had maintained a bubble of peace so long as his wife thought he was bedding some floozy every night. He didn’t know why that was preferable to her, but it was. A guilty part of him wondered if he knew much about his wife at all.

He certainly knew better than to declare his affair to her in defiance, but that was what he had done. As the words came out of his mouth, he’d sensed the bubble begin to pop. His time with Melanie had been safe from reality for both of them. He didn’t have daughters or a wife or a brother-in-law who might as well have been a crime boss. Nor did he have thirty years of business failures, debt, and untrustworthy money men.

And Melanie didn’t have her father. At least, not the Senator he’d become. She sometimes spoke of the illustrious William Barrett Cunningham in a way that sounded like he’d died when she was a girl. When this happened, Benny listened patiently and kindly with an instinctual empathy that equaled pantomiming emotions on his face while tossing the actual feelings into a black void. The woman — Melanie in this case, but a time existed when Elizabeth pressed against him instead — felt better after venting. And felt more willing to do the things Benny enjoyed.

The apartment was chosen for its location rather than comfort. The owner was an old woman, Widow Meriwether, who could barely stand, but spent the entirety of her day pacing from one task to the next. Her husband died in the Great War. She’d let out the top apartment of their building for the subsequent forty years to keep food on her table. Widow Meriwether was the perfect landlord. She took payment, asked no questions, and had a bad memory which Benny didn’t entirely believe was an act.

The space itself was little more than a room with a large window facing the small fenced garden on the backside of the building. Melanie had changed it to something more. She brought in a large bed frame and feather mattress. She added linens and curtains and cushions anywhere she could fit them. A small vanity went against the wall beside the window and a tall thin basin table went opposite it so that Benny could shave without going down the hall to the lavatory. Melanie lined the walls with her sketches. Most of them focused on natural life. Cherry trees, ducks on water, and other similar things. Benny didn’t find much interesting about those other than what they said about his lover. The ones he liked concerned human subjects. Two in particular were his favorites. The first of Melanie herself, drawn sitting in the chair at her vanity. The other of Widow Meriwether, bent and still defiant as she swept the front sidewalk entirely unaware of the artist capturing her on paper.

Stepping through into this slice of paradise took away the cares of the world. His discussion with Greg early that morning had gone less than favorably. Coward that he was, Benny spent most of the drive wondering how he could have his cake and eat it, too. He couldn’t envision leaving Melanie altogether, but neither could he conceive of having both Greg and Elizabeth as enemies. He considered ways of pitting them against one another. Perhaps by appealing to Abby’s sense of love. Even with all her cold science, Benny believed his sister-in-law to be a true romantic at heart. Unfortunately, that romance hinged too crucially on her husband. It was something Benny long admired about the other couple, mainly because of how absolutely void his own marriage was of such devotion.

Melanie was asleep in the bed. He didn’t know if she’d gone to her father’s home the night before and come back that morning or if she’d stayed the night. The latter possibility made him ache with regret for ever leaving her at all. She was as beautiful as ever. A sheet covered her loosely, but still showed her form underneath. Benny smirked as his body’s other demands took precedence over any attempts to dwell on misfortune. He left his shoes by the door and padded silently to the bed.

With a gentle touch, he pinched the lower part of the sheet and pulled it. Slow enough to be unnoticed, the sheet moved off Melanie’s shoulder and down her arm. Her breasts came free, pressed together as she rested her side, pink nipples jutting from their peaks. The sheet rolled down into the dip of her hip before sliding over her ass. Every time he saw it, Benny was surprised by the perky, tightness of her rear. It lacked the voluptuous sensuality of his wife’s or many of the other women he’d bedded, most of which had imbibed Milktec to some degree. But it was that same lack that made him find it so appealing. He could cup a whole cheek in one of his hands, and she spread open easily when she bent over, allowing him to savor the sight of both holes with little shadow to obscure them.

The sheet continued until her toes emerged, and she smiled as her eyes opened. “You’re back?” she said. “I was having the best dream.”

“Yeah? What about?” He undressed as he watched her body’s sensual movements.

Melanie rolled to her back and spread one knee wide. She kept herself shaved for him, though he’d never asked her to. He liked eating her out and enjoying the sight of her naked pussy both before and after their fucking, so she took the initiative to keep things smooth. It worked marvelously. Her lips glistened with the slickness of her arousal as she pushed a hand down between her thighs. “About that big cock of yours. It’s been almost twelve whole hours since you fucked my tight little pussy. Now come on, you know the rules. I showed you mine,” she punctuated the thought by pushing two fingers into herself, “now you show me yours.”

He knew he needed to tell her what was going on. He knew the feeling of dread should be dealt with and not ignored. But, Benny had never been a man to easily turn down a woman’s offer. Melanie’s gaze locked on to the bulge between his legs. Seeing her hungry for him only made him swell faster. His flung his shirt across the bedpost let his pants crumple to the floor. He kept on his boxers, knowing that denying her sight of him would heighten her need. For all Benny’s fascination with her body, he’d never been with a woman so devoted to his cock. The two didn’t seem equivalent. Though he loved the curve of her tits and the feeling of being inside her, he got much of the same sensation from them as from any of the other women he had fucked, even Elizabeth. For Melanie, though, it was his cock and his alone that drew out the inner slut that drove her to shacking up with a much older, married man. He pulled the boxers down slowly, pretending to be too distracted. His cock bent down until the fabric reached the tip and allowed it to spring up to full flight. As it bobbed up and down, Melanie gasped with excitement.

It wasn’t enhanced through Milktec serum as far as he knew. He took the stuff rarely, and as best he could remember he was still the same size he’d been on the night when he lost his virginity in a barn to one of the housemaids. She’d been ten years his senior at the time, but wailed all the same when he slid inside her. The sex was quick, the maid was loud, and his orgasm came when he slipped out and pressed his cock between their sweating bodies to spill his cum on her stomach. Afterward, though, lying in the prickly hay, the maid took hold of his cock at the base and told him that he would make every woman he ever fucked scream just like she did. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not until his first time with Elizabeth. She’d been enamored with his size, too. If the size of his bank account had been proportional, he doubted their marriage would have had a single rough day.

His beautiful new consort was drawn to him, or rather to it. So far as Benny knew, she’d been with one other man in her life. From the way she reacted to seeing his cock for the first time and exclaiming, “oh they get that big?”, Benny didn’t begrudge the forgotten young man for taking Melanie’s virginity and setting the bar dramatically lower than necessary. As she moved across the bed, he was treated to the sight of her tight ass swinging back and forth. She was thin with narrow hips compared to most women, but Benny thought her slight curves more beautiful in their own way.

Most men he knew would turn up their nose, as if beggars could be choosers, if they saw a woman’s hip bones jutting out. The padding found on women who’d been inadvertently swigging down Milktec for years was all the rage for the male mind, but Benny revered his uncorrupted gem for her svelte body. At the moment, she didn’t allow him to enjoy it. From her view, she had been ruthlessly deprived for entirely too long. Her warm fingers wrapped lovingly around his cock, and her mouth opened to swirl him into that wet bliss.

Benny let his head loll as he enjoyed her eager sucking. Women fully given over to the serum sometimes sucked cock with less enthusiasm than Melanie. He didn’t understand what it did for her, but he didn’t complain. It threw gasoline on his ego to feel her body shiver as her tongue flicked along the side of his cock. She often fingered herself while sucking him off, but at least once she came from having him in her mouth and nothing else. If they went too long without allowing her to play with his cock, she would become sullen and bratty, like a school girl denied her favorite toy. She insisted upon time to practice, working tirelessly to fit Benny down her throat or deeper in her pussy. The practice paid off, at least. He felt the cool rush of air as she switched her breathing. A second later, he slid into her throat.

Her body vibrated with pleasure, forcing out a gasp of pleasure from Benny. She squirmed a little closer on the bed and wriggled her throat down his length until her chin pressed into his balls. His hand slid into her hair and stroked it, coaxing her with praise as everything surrounding his cock spasmed in a vain attempt to reject the intruding thing. If he managed to concentrate, he could pick out the pattern of it, but he rarely bothered to devote that much attention to a specific feeling, instead letting the tight warmth spread through his thoughts and take away his worries.

You’re balls deep in the cocksucking throat of a senator’s daughter, Benny Boy. Enjoy her chin resting on those cherries of yours because either her dad or Greg or Elizabeth or some jealous fucker you don’t even know about will be slicing them off before you know it.

The thought irritated him, but Melanie didn’t notice. She pulled back until only the tip was still in her mouth. She brought her hand up and used the thick spit left behind as lube to stroke him. Widening her eyes she looked up at him with the flared head of his cock bulging out her lips. She let it slip out with a whimper before rubbing the fat length along her cheek. “Please,” she said, “on my face.”

Benny wasn’t one to turn down a polite request. The image of her smearing his cock back and forth across her lips framed with a background of slightly out of focus tits and the topside of her pert ass sent him over the edge. She slid her hand under his balls and squeezed for the second jet of cum, giving it an extra jerk of velocity to splash across the bridge of her nose. Pleased with her performance, she indulged by slurping the head of his cock back into her mouth and stroking out the last drops onto her tongue.

A few minutes later, he handed her a towel to clean up and flopped into the bed. She went to the basin and washed up before returning. They twined together their fingers. Benny pulled the sheet up to their waists only for Melanie to immediately break their handhold to circle her fingers around his dick. It stirred, returning to life with the ordinary vigor of a man not juiced on Milktec’s drug. He had no idea what she would do with him if he ever did take the stuff when they fucked. She might drown herself in his cum. She interrupted his thoughts, “How’d it go?”

“The blowjob?”

“The dinner with your wife,” she said with a hard squeeze on his dick.

“Swimmingly, darling. I announced I was leaving her. She’s decided to give me a nest egg, her blessing, and send us to Niagara Falls for the honeymoon.”

“Don’t kid, Benny,” she squeaked.

“Unfortunately, love, I’m only partially joking. Elizabeth knows. Not who you are, but that I’ve been seeing someone for a long time. Someone I intend to leave her to be with.”

Melanie pulled back from him. “You told her? Why? This isn’t how we talked about it. We needed to do it carefully, Benny.”

He knew she would be upset, but didn’t expect this reaction. She seemed embarrassed? “I know. I’ve told you how trying Elizabeth can be. She provoked me. Got under my skin, and I let it slip.”

“Your wife is a manipulative gossip. How long before she finds out that your mistress is me? How long after that until my father knows?”

“I’m handling it. I spoke with Greg this morning.”

“—And he’s going to deal with her?” Melanie asked, her tone softening.

“Ah, not exactly. But, it’s been less than a day. I’ve already set aside some money. Greg and Abby will come around on the issue. They always have a back up plan. They’ll have one for the off chance that your father finds out. For now, nothing has changed.”

“Except now your wife knows I exist,” she answered. “How can you not see how volatile she is? She’s hounded good women to the brink of madness because they wore the same color dress. That harpy won’t stop till she knows who you’re seeing and ruins my life. She’ll do it to keep you prisoner if nothing else. We should leave. Today. Now. We can get far enough away to buy us some time.”

He calmed her rising indignation in the best way he had to hand. He pulled her lips onto his and crushed her protests with a kiss until she melted back against him to find him getting harder. Benny wanted time to think and while he wanted Melanie’s input, she didn’t understand. He had a life that he couldn’t torch to the ground, not even for her. He had daughters. That the twins were not too much younger than Melanie was a constant source of self-flagellation. The girls could have been her schoolmates under different circumstances for Christ’s sake, and I just sprayed cum all over her face.

“We’ll be fine,” he told her. “I love you, and that’s not going to change. We simply have to find the most graceful way out of this mess. One that involves neither of us bearing the brunt of familial wrath.” His hands groped at her body as though she were fading out of existence. Had he already ruined it? Had revealing the relationship sullied it somehow? Melanie remained so unaware of these things. He hated to think her naïve, but knew little else to describe it. It was easier to be a young fool than an old one, so he thought to do the one thing that always made him feel young.

He pulled her to him, pressing their lips together again. Her nimble tongue danced around his. He forgot a long time ago what his wife’s lips tasted like, either set of them, but Melanie’s conjured up the heady aroma of perfumed parlors where bawdy women would fawn over Benny. He ran a thumb along the angle of her chin, brushing an eyelash away from her cheek as her head craned into his touch. He throbbed in her hand. He moved to push on top of her, but she held up a hand. “Wait,” she whispered. “I have a surprise.”

Melanie slipped out of bed and went over to the vanity. She pulled out a small bottle and something else Benny didn’t recognize even as she held it up for him. It reminded him of a spinning top made of dark glass. “I’ve been practicing other things,” Melanie said. “Getting this was difficult. A young woman has a hard time finding someone she can trust with such delicate matters. Lucky for me, I have politicians’ sons as friends, and they know many, many delights that they don’t advertise. Here.” She put the odd thing in his hands before uncorking the bottle and pouring a thick oil onto it.

Things clicked into place for Benny. “You practiced?” he said dumbly as he smeared the oil over the toy. She grinned at him, turned and bent over until she grabbed her ankles.

“Go slow. I want you to fuck my ass eventually, but playing with my pussy while this is inside it is so much fun. I want to feel both it and you in me at the same time.”

He looked at the pulsing bud of her asshole and wondered how often heart attacks happened to men his age and how many of them related to situations like this. He moved his oily hand around the toy wondering if it made a difference which way he treated as up. The glass was heavier than the bottom of a wine bottle, so he doubted it could break. He’d heard of such toys, but never thought of using one. Never dreamed of a woman volunteering one, certainly. He positioned the tip of it against the ring of her ass, smearing the oil around as best he could. Her breathing sounded slow and labored, which he assumed was intentional and not panic. A desire to use his tongue instead seized hold of him, but that seemed a bit forward, strangely enough. Applying gentle pressure, her rear entrance slowly yielded. The opening stretched around the black glass until it reached the maximum width. He held it there for a fraction of a second wondering if he was about to pass some arcane threshold in their relationship. The plug popped inside, and the entrance sealed around the stem-like base.

Melanie was a moaning mess, but she stood up and turned around. Her juices mingled with the dripping oil as she climbed on top of Benny. His cock was beyond aching or throbbing, going nearly numb with need. With her hands pressing on his chest, she straddled him and lowered herself down on his thick cock. She went slower than usual, and he knew why. The tight sheath of warmth was wriggling with spasmodic movements, clamping down on every centimeter more of invading flesh. The deeper he reached, the more keenly he felt the bulge of the toy pushing against her walls. Halfway down his length, she grabbed her own tits and squeezed as she violently orgasmed. Each jerk and moan pushed her a little further down his cock. Benny wanted to grab hold of her hips and wildly fuck her, but didn’t know how that would work with a competing phallus in her ass. Instead, he was subjected to a unique experience of being fucked by one long, slow thrust of jittering pleasure.

Finally, she rested her oiled ass on his hips and wrapped her hands around the back of his neck to pull him up to her. They kissed again, and she rocked her hips along his length. She pressed her face to his cheek, kissing, licking, and nipping at his ears. She whispered things which he barely understood. Told him to fuck her. Told him to own her. Told him to coat her insides with cum. He heard only one sentence clearly, and it sent him into an uncontrolled, sudden orgasm. “Fuck my pussy and knock me up with a plug in my slutty ass.”

He grabbed her and pushed her down on his length. One hand grabbed her ass while the other found the back side of the plug and pushed on it. Benny felt it slide against his cock inside of her as he erupted.

They fell into a sweaty pile until she rolled off of him and onto the bed. Benny didn’t know if his legs would work if he tried to stand. He wanted to tell her some of the things in his head, but they all sounded too ineffective to describe the feeling they’d shared. Besides, his mouth was dry. He stood up, teetered, but didn’t fall over. She was curled up on the bed with the end of the toy still sticking out of her ass. Based on how tight she’d gotten near the end, he didn’t know if that would come out any time soon.

Moving over to the basin, he washed his hands and face. He finished drying and prepared to confront reality once again, but a loud thump shook the door. Melanie sat up awkwardly and pulled the sheet to cover not only herself but the oil stain and cum that puddled on the bed. The thump came again. Benny grabbed a robe from the back of the closet door. Whoever it was, he was feeling reckless enough to give them a piece of his mind.

Benny opened the door to an empty hallway. Other than the shadow. A coiling feeling in his gut told him that he recognized the shadow. He followed it back to the lumbering figure standing a few feet down the hall. “Hey ya, Benny,” Maddock said.

Later, Benny would wonder what possessed him to storm out into the hallway since the natural assumption was that Maddock would snap his neck. Anger or indignation or a desire to protect his bubble, whatever it was, Benny slid out of the door with a wave at Melanie and stomped up to the bigger man, “Did you fucking follow me here?”

A hand like an anvil thumped onto Benny’s shoulder, Maddock tilted his head to the side in a “does it matter” motion, but he added, “No. I asked around.”

“Bullshit. No one knows about this place.”

“People always hide the wrong thing. They think they have to hide from guys in black hats following them from the bus. Those guys exist in the movies and detective novels. In reality, it’s the folks who live up and down the block. They see everything. None of it matters to them, but they see it. ‘Who’s that young girl staying with the Widow Meriwether? Not her granddaughter. She never had kids. Some lady renting the room, but too young to be on her own.’ Benign gossip, that’s the stuff that trips people up. Little bits of mundane life sticking out every which way.”

Benny eased away and slid his hands in his robe pockets to try looking calm. back with his hands in his robe pockets. “That may be the most I’ve ever heard you speak.”

Maddock shrugged.

“So, you found me. Now what?”

Maddock made the head tilt motion again. “Boss wanted to make sure you understood the severity of the situation.” He glanced at the door. “Do I need to go explain it to her, too?”

Benny stiffened. “Why should I let Greg bully me? Isn’t it enough that I have to battle with my wife? Do I also have to fight my whole family?”

Another shrug. “You’re hitting too close to home on this one, Benny. Any other girl, it wouldn’t matter. This one causes problems. Problems we will have to solve.”

“Greg wouldn’t dare,” Benny whispered.

The last shrug once again filled Benny with an urge to throw a punch, but he didn’t think a broken hand would improve his situation. “Gotta get back. It’s my night off.”

The big man shuffled down the hall to the stairwell before coming to a stop. He looked back and met Benny’s eyes. How much could someone say in a shrug? The one Maddock gave before he vanished seemed to say that he was sorry, that he understood, and that he wished things were different. But, it was merely a shrug.

Benny didn’t move for another few minutes. He tried to find something that could end it with Melanie. He’d always been good at letting women go. It can hold another day. Two, maybe. The twins won’t miss me. I can stay with Mel, talk through it, get her to see why we have to end it. She thinks it’s all about Elizabeth. But, if I asked her to leave now like she wants — like she says she wants…

Melanie had a complex relationship with her father. As distant as they had become, she revered the man and tolerated no ill word against him from any mouth except her own. Benny often wondered if he was some pawn in a game she was playing on her own. If she was tempting him to leave his wife only because she knew he wouldn’t.

Another day. I can take that long. He headed back into the room, told Melanie it was a plumber asking if they’d had drain trouble. She believed him immediately. He told her to clean up, that they would spend the night dancing. She charged out of the bed with enthusiasm. Benny flopped into it, curled up under the sheet, and shut his eyes. While his mistress cheerfully hummed at her vanity, Benny tried to imagine leaving the city, Farrs Post, Greg, Elizabeth, and even his daughters behind.