Nikki (8 page)

Abruptly Nikki began to cry, her voice a piteous little pleading sound. “No,” she begged. “Please, no, don’t. Oh, please don’t. You musn’t. Please.” She began to sob heartbrokenly.

She became aware of a slackening of his intensity, a cooling and a slight withdrawal. He didn’t quite free her. He held her subdued yet, but she could feel him poised on the edge of retreat. Nikki increased the urgency of her crying.

He was peering down at her face, his mouth wonderingly open. Nikki knew the sight of tears was dissolving him, and she knew that pain lent her beauty a new dimension and potency. He looked away as though trying to sense the invisible line between rape and furious resistance as a passionate woman’s method of lovemaking.

At last he decided it would be rape. He freed her, moved off the sofa, and sat down beside her on the floor. “Don’t cry,” he began huskily. “Don’t cry, girl.”

Her crying became muffled. His hand was shaky, and the power was slackening out of it as he stroked her cheek and soothed, “It’s all right … all right. Please don’t cry. I wouldn’t hurt you, dearest. I … I lost myself, but it’s all right now.”

She lay quietly, staring at the ceiling.

“Won’t you speak to me?” he begged. “I didn’t understand, didn’t realize. Say you understand—say you forgive me.”

Nikki sat up slowly, wiping at her tears. “I understand!” she said angrily. She raised herself till she was standing on her knees on the sofa above him, and her face was haughty and scornful. “No quarter, eh? I might have known you were bluffing. Get out of here!”

“But, Nikki!” he cried out, stunned. “Nikki, my God. I couldn’t …”

“Please go!” she said icily.

“I couldn’t
rape
you.”

“There’s a will to defeat in you. You lack the winning punch. I’m sorry. Damned sorry. But you’ll have to go.”

“You cried. You fought and you cried and … You broke my heart. You sounded so … I could no more have gone on and hurt you than … I adore you, Nikki!”

“I fought with everything I had. You quit.”

“You cried. Tears. Real tears.”

“Yes. All of me went into the battle. Real tears, real fear … my whole instinct protested. Why? So it would take everything you had to overcome me. You didn’t have enough. Or you lacked the guts to use what you have, and there’s little difference.”

“I was wrong,” he said, a hopeful lift to his tone. “I judged wrong. If what you wanted was …” He surged upward and tried to embrace her skirt, but she pushed his head away from her body.

“Stay down. You couldn’t possibly pick me up from a dead cold start. Not now. You haven’t a chance, ever, of conquering me. Not now.”

“Nikki, dearest, I think—I
know
I love you. Yes, I do. Let’s forget this and … Nikki, let me love you, let me love you. You’re so beautiful. I worship you.”

“Get up.” She got to her feet and stood over him contemptuously.

“No. It’s because I loved you too much, too tenderly to hurt you.”

“Get up! I can get a million men content to be at my feet. I want a man I can see when I look
up
.”

Stung, he exploded, “God
damn
you!”

Nikki caught up her fur, covering her upper body, and walked over to the light switch and turned it on. She stood watching him as he groped for his shoes. He sat down and put them on, glaring and muttering.

“You won’t have a gentleman. You want a rapist.”

“It’s not that,” she said tightly. “The very fact that I brought you here alone said something. The fact that I let you kiss me, hold me intimately, restated it. No device of resistance, nothing I could have said or done afterward could have changed it.” He didn’t answer, and presently Nikki was alone.

Nikki shimmied the gown down off her hips, let it settle in a brilliant ring around her feet and stepped on it indifferently, thinking “Love!” She’d abused him and he’d whimpered “Love!”

She flung her diamond tiara and earrings on the dressing table, crossed to the big custom bed where she lay on her back and peeled out of her panties, garter belt and nylons. She went into the shower stall sweating and puffing and hit her body with a hard spray, wanting to scrub away every remnant of tonight.

She stepped out of the shower and stood towelling her hair, her lifted arms vibrating, her long body shining wet and dripping on the mat. She carried a large towel into the adjoining room, spread it on the chaise and lay down, switching on the hot air dryer. A towel was quicker; the gadget was hedonistic nonsense, but its touch was loving and it had the advantage of instant switch-offableness. She lay feeling its warm breath on her naked body, closed her eyes and moved herself voluptuously, enjoying the knowledge of her desirability. She turned on her side and then on her stomach, then again lay supine with one knee lifted and moving lazily from side to side in a soft, sensual rhythm. The warm air caressed and stroked with infinite tenderness like bodiless lovers adoring her flesh with slow silent hands and mouths.

Presently she was tingling all over from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, and her heart was pounding. She opened her eyes widely and they were glistening. A flush came over her face and a joyous look of exaltation suffused her. She laughed softly.

The sound of her voice sobered her, and a slight chill raced over her hot skin. This was really a brand new chapter in the fascinating story of Nikki Duquesne. Nikki takes a machine as lover. She switched it off. Her hair was still wet but she towelled it for a while, then bound it in a towel and went to bed.

The machine as lover had its logic, she thought dully, and its advantages. It could be designed to stimulate and impregnate and one could be spared the emotional difficulty that always accompanied the human models. And no guilt feelings would follow if you kicked hell out of the machine. Not that she had any guilt feelings. Why should she? After all, John Barket was no child … even if he had rather looked like one sitting there putting on his shoes with that tuft of hair sticking up from the crown of his head.

Sure, it had been bitchy, but it was done. She might have relented, up to the very last instant when he had slammed out the door. But she hadn’t. She’d wanted to relent, to say a kind word to him. No. At the time she hadn’t had any such impulse, so face it! While she had been in that state there hadn’t been the slightest pity or tenderness in her. She shut her eyes hard, drew her lips back and sucked air in through her teeth, revolted with herself. Then she rolled onto her stomach, buried her face in the pillow, and said silently, Sorry … sorry … sorry … oh, God, I’m sorry.

Words. Her breast was cold, and she felt grim rather than repentant. She couldn’t feel sorry. Something warned her against it, against the danger of letting loose. Feeling sorry for someone else quickly degenerated into self-pity, and from there on you got sucked deeper and deeper into maudlin, crippling quicksand.

Hell, she hadn’t crushed him. It was pure arrogance to imagine she had that much power. He’d proven he was all right by rallying and cursing her like a man. Good for him, she thought, with a sense of pride and relief. Yes, he’d cursed her and walked out, and it was plain masochism to worry over what she’d done.

Cheap! she told herself. Cheap, irresponsible evasion. Merely because he’d survived it didn’t mean she hadn’t done anything. She had degraded more than the man, she had laughed at the quality of mercy itself. She had been defenseless, and she had appealed to the finest in him and he had had the ears and the heart to hear, and for that she had abused him!

She turned restlessly in the bed. So, there it was. That’s what she had done, and whether she liked it or not it had shown what she was. She could hang her head and promise herself to be a good girl and change herself, or she could have the strength to accept what she was and live with it. True strength demanded acceptance of the true self. If she hadn’t wanted to hurt she wouldn’t have done it. She smiled, remembering the first whipping she’d ever given a male. It had been half her life ago, but it was as vivid as yesterday. Her breasts had been smaller, her thighs and bottom skimpier, but she had been as tall as she was now and in some ways prettier.

The boy, son of a veterinarian, had been thirteen too and about her size, or slightly taller. He’d taken to hanging around the Duquesne place and eyeing her breasts and legs when he thought she wasn’t noticing. He’d goaded her about a favorite horse until Nikki had challenged him to a race. Her father hadn’t built the training track yet but there’d been a smooth quarter-mile lane and they had ridden out to it.

Nikki had been in a loose shirt and denim shorts, her feet and long tanned legs bare as they brought their mounts up on the line. Instead of alerting himself for the race as she counted to three, he sneaked his gaze up her thighs to the paleness beyond the tan near her crotch. Nikki broke fast and beat him by six lengths.

He caught up with her at the end of the lane, grinning over his defeat, and it had so enraged her that she’d pitched off her horse at him and pulled him to the ground. She’d punched and pummelled him and they had wrestled and rolled, and at the end she was astride him, her knees dug into his sides, her hands holding his arms down as she panted and glared down at him. Defeated and grinning, he had lain under her making snapping motions with his teeth at her breasts.

His contemptible, fightless surrender hadn’t been to her but to sex, so she had gone out next day with her breasts bound and her hair tied up and she challenged him. He tried to laugh out of it but Nikki insulted him beyond endurance, and he came to her blind-mad.

She beat him and held him down until he struggled himself out. Then she continued to hold him down, forcing him to know it was no game, that he couldn’t get up until she let him. She sat on him till he was blubbering with shame and rage, then she got up jeering with laughter and triumph. He’d run with his tail between his legs.

But he had come back, day after day after day, and she had bossed him around like a slave in front of the help, and he had submitted to her every humiliation. She wondered now if John Barket would be coming back for more.

She got out of bed, lighted a cigarette and stood in the dark watching the fog. Her window looked down on the Fairmont Hotel a few blocks east, and during a thinning of the fog she saw a cavalcade of limousines. She wondered if it was the party from the ballet arriving for the midnight supper. Dolores would have missed her by now, and she’d be worried or angry, or both. Nikki’s mouth twisted, wondering if John Barket would trot whimpering to his good friend Jim to report on her.

Jim would be indignant, and he’d tell Dolores, and Dolores would question Nikki and Nikki would resent it. Then there would be a break. Nikki felt chilly and got into a robe and slippers and went into the living room. How absurd she was. John Barket wasn’t going to talk about a thing like that; it wasn’t going to cause a break with Dolores.

She, Nikki, was going to cause the break. This whole plan of living here, of gracious entertaining in this bright apartment, of blending herself into Dolores’s safe, pretty world, was surrender. It wasn’t Nikki, it was Nicolette, a ghost creature, for the Nicolette in her was long dead.

“Nicolette is
such
a rewarding child!” Her mother had said it often. Nicolette had been lively and happy and good at games, and all the world had worn a smiling face. She pleased everybody and everybody pleased her, and she had been her mother’s pride, well-mannered, pretty, charming and obedient, always obedient. Incredible, Nikki thought, but as a young girl she had never even been tempted to the usual small naughtinesses; consciously at least she couldn’t remember that she’d had so much as a defiant
thought
.

From the time she’d been three there had always been boys in school or dancing class or riding academy wanting to protect and serve her. Girls too had liked her; almost always she had been some older girl’s special pet. But at twelve, when her mind and breasts had begun to thrust, she had become acutely aware of a stabbing challenge in every male glance, and she had begun to feel the wary edge of antagonism in other females.

In particular she had sensed her mother’s new attitude, a shift from tender pride and protectiveness toward hostility. The thing had been inexpressible in words, but from the core of her maturing womb Nikki had understood. She was no longer a pretty and dependent child but a woman, and a dazzling one at that, and all her mother’s instinctive femaleness had roused against Nikki’s new, deadly competition.

Where all had been softly harmonious within the Duquesne world, there was a sudden narrowing and battle, and Nicolette-emerged-as-Nikki had felt suddenly stripped, cut off from her mother and afraid of nothing in particular and of everything.

At that time her father had scarcely existed. She had loved him and she had considered him her “beau” and the sight and the feel of him had always been a delight. But in a sense he had been remote, a splendid romantic figure, but he had been for occasions, for parties and surprises and trips, and his love for her had had a special holiday flavor.

Becoming her mother’s competitor had felt horrible, and at first Nikki had wanted only to break through the new, invisible wall and into her mother’s arms. And she could feel her mother reaching for her; during that period of transition from Nicolette to Nikki, Nikki had spells of babyishness and dependence during which she and her mother seemed even closer than they had ever been before, and Nikki’s fear would leave her.

But after such spells Nikki would feel an odd shame, and she would remember little moments of self-consciousness between them as if they both knew it was a sad pretense, doomed to fail against the simple, natural and awful force of sex. Nikki became more desirable as her mother, approaching middle age, waned.

A small, pretty, brown-haired woman with a round, smiling face and lovely brown eyes, her mother had a charmingly plump little figure. Nikki’s father would often say, “You’re a comfortable woman, Estelle, comfortable as a pillow.”

Never handsomer than when he was teasing, he would look down at her and she would turn her eyes away and simper, “Oh, Claude, you big old spoofer!”