Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

SOMETHING EXTRA J. N. Williamson and James Kisner

My wife said she didn't really mind if I thought about someone else when we made love," I told her on impulse. "So I thought of you."

Monica's response was instant. She slapped me across the face, stingingly, and then walked off in a huff. Her hips were fighting her natural impulse to wiggle and I was glad I'd said it on the premises of Rollins Advertising Agency. If it had been a less public place, she might have torn my head off. If Monica's husband had been around, he would have. Larry still has a tattoo of an eagle on the back of his right hand, and I've heard that bird takes wing when he gets good and pissed.

Sighing, I poured myself a cup of coffee and took it back to my desk.

I hadn't meant to blurt that out to Monica Patterson, but what I'd said was true. When I'd seen her standing next to me in the kitchenette, where the agency always has two pots of coffee brewing, the words had just tumbled out of my mouth. Maybe it was her perfume or merely the fact that Monica looks like such a naturally sexual woman — not sexy, sexual. She has long black hair that tucks in at the ends and a figure that's more like seventeen than early thirties, so I had to say something.

No, it was none of that. It was her dark brown eyes that seem to be far away and fixed on something far more interesting than writing ad copy, and how she said «Hi» as she accidentally brushed against me. She'd reached for a Styrofoam cup and her left breast had touched my shoulder as it rose, she had let it stay there for a second, and…

No, I admitted as I returned to my little cubicle, it wasn't those things either. I'd wanted her to know. Out of perversity, maybe — just to see what she would do, perhaps.

I worried that one of our co-workers might notice how my face was red from Monica's slap, but nobody paid much attention to me. Everyone was busy at their word processors, banging out copy. Which was my job, too. Banging out copy. I sat down and stared at the word processor screen. I was banging away about sleeve bearings for one of Rollins's biggest clients. It wasn't exactly like writing the Great American Novel, which I didn't especially want to do anyway, but it paid the bills. The majority of them, anyway.

I sipped some coffee, set it down, rested my fingertips on the keyboard. My mind searched for some brilliant phrase to describe the client's new sleeve bearings, but it proved elusive. Instead, my thoughts drifted to the night before. When I was making love to Sheila and Monica Patterson popped into my mind, saying «Hi» in the breathy way she did it at the office.

I felt guilty at first. There I was, dutifully pounding away on my wife Sheila (who isn't bad-looking, has always been faithful, has kept slim after bearing two children, and who can even cook without looking anxiously to the microwave), and I was imagining another woman. One who is definitely good-looking, slim only where it counts, has macho Larry-with-the-tattooed-eagle and no kids, and might or might not be faithful.

To my surprise, Sheila told me what I'd done was okay.

She didn't specifically say it was okay to picture Monica beneath me, but Sheila is a liberated woman and reads a lot about sex. Dr. Ruth, Graham Masterton, Masters and Johnson. Once she read that it was healthy to fantasize about someone else while making love to the spouse. The newer sex books even encouraged mental cheating, Sheila explained. She startled the hell out of me by admitting she sometimes thought of Tom Selleck when we were going at it; so she didn't really mind if I imagined Elvira or Kathleen Turner or Kim Basinger.

Trouble is that I'd tried those women, mentally, and they didn't do the trick. They were beautiful, desirable, and inaccessible. Remote. Unavailable. Additionally, I hadn't been able to persuade my libido to believe that any of those women would look twice at a junior copywriter named Ron Bowers.

So I'd begun thinking of someone real (so to speak). Someone I knew.

Monica.

I guessed I'd sort of spoiled it by letting her know and getting slapped. I'd been stupid, ignorant. Monica had probably believed I was hitting on her, and I really, truly was not.

Of course, I'd thought about it a lot.

I bumped into Monica later at the front door when we were coming individually back from lunch. I blushed; she gave me a dirty look. I followed her to her cubicle anyway, needing to explain. She was secretary to the media guy, who buys the ads for the firm that makes the bearings I try to describe. Monica never exposes an inch of the flesh I'd imagined infinitely better than sleeve bearings, and her clothes aren't tight-fitting but they're far-out, unmatching blouses or sweaters with long skirts that sort of swing between her legs or jeans that are always worn at key spots and look as if just a tiny bit of earnest rubbing might make the skin show through.

She sat behind her desk, pretending I wasn't there. Trying to come up with something clever as an opening, I hovered around until I noticed a big jar of peppermint pinwheels rising from a stack of printed-out pages. "Can I have a mint?"

She stared at me. Through me.

I took a mint, unwrapped and popped it into my mouth. I figured it might sweeten my pizza breath. "I'm sorry," I said. The pinwheel was rolling around on my tongue and making me mumble. Another stupid mistake, I realized. "I wasn't coming on to you but I shouldn't have said that." I turned to leave. "I didn't mean to be insulting." Abased, I grinned a little and took a step away.

"Wait," Monica said.

I stood stock-still. She was glancing around as if she intended to say or do something and needed privacy. No one else was back from lunch yet, and we were alone. "Do you want to slap my other cheek?" I asked her.

"No, I–I just wanted to say that I'm sorry." She got her cigarette case out of her purse, evading my gaze for another moment. "I shouldn't have hit you, Ron."

"Sure you should," I disagreed. "You've met Sheil, I've met your husband Larry at the Christmas party. We might've all been friends and I messed it up."

Monica lit a Vantage Ultra Light, puffed it with an enigmatic expression. The puffs of smoke came my way like hot breath. "Did you really mean it?" she asked.

"Did I mean what?" Hell, I could be mysterious, too.

She frowned. It made her prettier than ever. "You only said one thing." Monica leaned across the desk. "Were you really thinking about me while — while you were with Sheila?"

"Sure," I confessed. "It was okay with Sheil. She's very liberal."

"But," Monica continued, "why me? I'm married, too. It seemed kind of weird when I heard it." She sucked in smoke. Lucky Ultra Light, I thought, it had the advantage. "Don't you think that's — well, sick? A little?"

"Nope. And why not you?" I asked. "Sheila read a book about sexual fantasies and said that it's normal for a man or woman to think of somebody else during lovemaking. Because it enhances the relationship, not just the sex. Adds something extra."

"Really?" A lot of smoke came my way then and from her flared nostrils, too.

"Really, according to my wife's book. Because it doesn't hurt anyone, and —»

Her eyebrows arched, her head lowered a fraction of an inch. Her twerp boss — which is what my boss calls him, too — was on a straight line toward Monica.

Under my voice, I muttered, "We can rap later," and then I stole another mint.

"Fine," she replied. She got her body arranged in a businesslike posture. "And, thanks. I think!"

At five-thirty I'd banged out three pages of decent copy concerning sleeve bearings. Also roller bearings and plain, old ball bearings. It should've been more like twenty pages but my thoughts kept meandering back to what Monica had said before we parted: "Thanks." Why "thanks"?

I didn't know why, but it bothered the crap out of me.

It was very busy at the agency the next couple of days, and I didn't see or chat with Monica. We passed in the hall en route to the coffee makers or the copy machine, but that was it — a glance and a nod. Yet I detected something brewing in Ms. Patterson's mind and believed it was every bit as hot as coffee. An expert with women isn't required when they are onto something truly serious, important to them. And that's good, since I am definitely not an expert.

The phone on my desk buzzed on Friday morning. "Ron Bowers."

"Hi." Monica, maybe smoking a Vantage again. "Tell me, are you free for lunch?"

"Yeah. I guess so." Mystery for mystery. My blood warmed up, churned a bit.

"Meet me at the front door," Monica proposed. "Eleven-thirty?"

"Okay. If you want."

"I want," she answered and rung off.

I got the goal of twenty pages within range at seventeen sheets of tribute to bearings of all kinds, but that was because I'd banged out twelve of them over the past two days. Maybe Monica had rethought our discussion and Larry would be there with the eagle on his fist spreading its wings, but I doubted it. I want, Monica had told me. What?

She was wearing a sweater and skirt that matched perfectly, clung to her body like wallpaper that had just been hung again at Monticello and advertised the exciting news that she'd abandoned brassieres — for lunch, at least. We walked together to a tavern around the corner from Rollins where they served decent sandwiches and a wide range of imported beers. Management didn't mind our mild imbibing if there were no afternoon meetings with clients. I listened to the brunette's unexpected high heels going tap, tap, tap while we took a table in a back corner, hoping to dodge any fellow employees and starting to wonder what I'd do if Monica Patterson was considerably more available and accessible than Elvira and Company. I'd always been a loyal husband except once that didn't count.

Point is, we gulped down two beers apiece along with most of our sandwiches while Monica discussed every subject under the sun except the one that had made her ask me to lunch. Then the cigarette case came out, I was taking her lighter to ignite it, and she was jumping on the topic at hand with both feet.

"Ron, you were great last night," she said in a breath.

I sputtered, "What?" and drooled imported beer down my chin to the collar.

She touched my hand. "I did what you and Sheila recommended!" She freed my hand so I could mop off my face with a napkin. "I imagined it was you when Larry was on top of me! And it made for an entirely new, wonderful experience!"

"I should be flattered," I answered when I could speak. "I suppose."

Monica's brown eyes smoldered with a memory that included me — but one I could not share. "And the more I thought of it being you and not Larry, the better it became. We did it twice! Why, it's like having an affair but not worrying about being caught!"

I studied her eyes without knowing what to say. Monica was really excited. What had I started? It seemed very strange to me, just then, not the way it had seemed… before.

"Ron, it's truly wonderful." She wanted me to understand. Her hand reached for mine once more and I pulled it back. "We've come up with a terrific new kind of safe sex!"

I looked away, out the window. "Well, maybe not quite that, not exactly that."

"It's fun and satisfying, anyway." Now she was pouting. She put her hands in her lap, crimsoning slightly. She was gorgeous. "Just like you said, it doesn't hurt anyone."

I managed a grin. "I was okay, then?" I asked. "I was really good?"

"God." She gasped, rolling her melting chocolate eyes. "Were you ever!"

I felt my frown come back. "But it was Larry — Macho Man with the goddamned bird on his hand — not me!"

Monica shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. You know what I mean."

"No, I don't," I snapped. I suppose I wanted details, wanted to know how I'd made it so great for her. Share some of the high. "Not really."

Monica put her head forward across the table to speak with as much confidentiality as humanly possible, there in the tavern. Her dark hair framed her very sexual face (I'd been right about that part); she'd lost most of her lipstick having her sandwich and the beers, and her mouth was moist. "Thinking it was you, believing it was you instead of Larry — the fact that it was another man, a different man — was very much like it was you. I feel as if I know" — she blinked in embarrassment, nibbled her lower lip — "every inch of your body. Do you see?"

"I guess." It sounded peculiar as the devil to me, even dangerous in a way I hadn't imagined. But I couldn't have stood away from our table then without embarrassing myself badly.

Her voice was husky. Her gaze wasn't on my face. It had dropped considerably lower. "Isn't that how you do it, don't you absolutely see me under you?"

My God, I thought. "Well, hell," I said, "if it was good for both of us!"

She laughed loudly, irrepressibly. It was the sort of teasing laugh, when a woman's mouth widens in a very distinct, certain way, that makes a man think of things he could do with her lips.

I went on picturing her mouth the rest of the day, even when I was reaching my twenty-page goal. It was that or put my job right on the line. I didn't have any idea whether my boss would approve my copy or not, but I'd done a solid piece of work in passionately putting on paper the way our client's parts rested on other parts and made them turn, slowly, with mechanical and well-oiled precision…

When I made a similarly persuasive approach to red-haired, slender Sheila that night — my thoughts already on where I'd put my latest issue of the adult comic book Cherry — Sheil responded as if I had suggested that she might possibly like to have a new house or automobile. Or Tom Selleck, perhaps. Since I have never been one to look gift horses in the mouth, I began helping my wife remove her clothes while she returned that favor and, subsequently, several others. We hadn't done that in years. Or the "several other" things I cited.

She didn't even appear surprised when I was the one who reached up from bed to switch off the light.

She didn't appear to wonder if the children were sound asleep, and neither did I.

For an incredibly long period of time, in fact, neither one of us wondered about anything except the products of human nature and human need.

Sleeve bearings and ball bearings, I rediscovered, weren't the only things that performed as though they were well-oiled and perfect at a level far exceeding anything of which the mechanical was capable.

I stole one of my wife's cigarettes from the headboard — her cigarette lighter, too — and lit up.

She was lying on her side, faced away from me. Her long black hair was asprawl on the pillow and, even that way, the ends of the beautiful hair were tucked in. When I glanced down at the cigarette in my hand, I saw that I was smoking a Vantage Ultra Light.

The hand that held it carelessly and manfully between index and middle fingers had an eagle on the back.