“In one of the places I worked, there was a girl who taught me that trick.”
“You ought to tell a man why you’re doing it. If he’s any kind of man, he won’t mind.”
“It makes most men mad when I try to tell them. They start to droop, and I lose a customer.” She shook her head; Longarm could just see the movement in the gloom. “You know, Windy, you’re the first man in more than a year who’s brought me off?”
“How about your old hometown sweetheart?”
“Lonnie? I wasn’t sweet on him. When he ran into me there in Texarkana, I thought for a while I could go back to being Susanna Mudgett. But I couldn’t. And he didn’t do anything at all for me. All I felt was him prodding around in me.” Dolly sighed. “I guess it’s really my fault.”
“Maybe. But maybe you just never started right.”
She frowned. “I guess I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come over here, Dolly.”
Dolly didn’t question his invitation. She got off the bunk and took the half-step necessary to reach Longarm. He took her hand and pulled her gently down onto his lap. Dolly relaxed with a contented sigh, and tried to curl up when his arms went around her, but he ran one hand down over her breasts and stomach in a long, sweeping, soft caress that ended when he reached her thighs and pressed on them with just enough force to keep her body straight.
Bending his head down, Longarm began to kiss Dolly’s breasts, circling their nipples in turn with his lips and, between kisses, brushing over them with his chin and mustache. Her skin erupted in gooseflesh when the sharp hairs of his beard rasped across her nipples. Longarm slipped a hand between her thighs, buried his fingers in her silken pubic hair, and started to rub gently within her soft and still-moist folds. Dolly’s body, so relaxed when she’d first settled down on his lap, began to grow stiff.
So did Longarm, but he waited until he was completely hard before lifting her around. He stretched his legs and brought them up between hers as he moved her. Then he lowered Dolly until he could feel her dewy fur against his erection. He held her suspended for a moment, her hips swaying, and lowered her even more slowly while sliding into her. He let her body descend by fractions of an inch, each movement putting him in her deeper and deeper.
Even while Longarm was only half-buried inside her, Dolly began to breathe irregularly. His hands, in her armpits, could feel the expansion and contraction of her ribs. When he’d gone in almost all the way, Longarm released Dolly’s body. As she slid down the final few inches of his erection, he brought his own hips up with a sharp, quick snap to stop her descent. The shock of this final penetration brought from Dolly’s lips an involuntary gasp of surprised pleasure.
She fell forward against him, her head lolling on his shoulder, and whispered, “Oh, that was wonderful. I’ve never had a man go into me so deep, or fill me up the way you do.”
Longarm stood up. He let Dolly ride him as he shuffled his feet, turning around. He held her to him while they dropped to the bunk, and when their bodies met the thin, tattered mattress, he thrust hard. Dolly whimpered, a jagged little cry, as his weight drove in. Involuntarily she raised her legs and locked her ankles around his waist.
“I’m starting to build up already,” she told him in a low voice. “Just stay with me as long as you can. I think this is going to be something I’ve never had happen to me before.”
Longarm began easing himself in and out with slow, deliberate strokes. When he felt himself beginning to build, he stopped and pressed hard against Dolly. She squirmed with impatience while she waited for him to begin thrusting again, but Longarm took his time. He let her build with him until, at last, she began to gasp deep in her throat while her body shivered in rolling spasms and her upward thrusts grew frantic. Then he let himself go, pounding hard and fast, driving into her relentlessly.
Only after she’d begun to fall back and lie limp, accepting his thrusts but unable to respond to them any longer, did Longarm speed, with a few quick jabs, to his own orgasm. Then he let himself down on her gently while her body continued to quiver, and now and then to shake in a little convulsive spasm. He lay on her, still buried in her depths but flaccid now, almost as drained as she was.
At last Dolly said, “I’m half asleep, but I still want to feel you in me, even if you’re not stiff hard.”
“Go to sleep, if you want to,” he told her. “I’ll stay here until you do.”
He kept his promise, waiting until Dolly’s breasts rose and fell beneath his chest in deep, regular breathing. Then Longarm left her, moving softly so that he wouldn’t wake her. He stepped over to the other bunk and stretched out. He lay there for a short while, listening to the soft rhythm of Dolly’s breathing. He was too relaxed and pleasantly exhausted to think about the long ride they’d be making the next day, and the problems he’d be facing during the days that would follow. Soon he fell asleep too.
Longarm noticed Dolly studying him over the rim of her raised coffee cup as he lighted a cheroot. He’d looked up before she had expected him to, before she could blink the sadness from her eyes. Through the swirl of blue smoke that shimmered between them, he asked her, “You sure you’re doing what you really want to, Dolly?”
“I’m doing what I think best, Windy. I never will go back to Yates Center. My family turned me out once, and I don’t intend to give them a chance to do it again.”
“And you’d sooner go back to…” he hesitated.
Dolly finished the thought. “To whoring in a saloon? I’m used to it, and it’s not a bad life. Oh, sure, I’d like to stay with you, at least right this minute, but I know I can’t. I’d always be afraid I’d slow you down at some time when you couldn’t afford it, like I did Lonnie. Or I might turn out to get like Belle Starr. So I’ll go back to Texarkana for a while. Sooner or later, I’ll move on. Who knows? We might run into one another again sometime.”
“We might at that,” Longarm agreed.
They were sitting in the dining room of the Union Depot in Fort Smith. The day before, they’d left Younger’s Bend before daylight and ridden steadily. At Little Juarez, they’d been in time to stop at the general store
