sex-play.
And although he wanted the challenge of another, younger girl, Michael had been unable to seriously contemplate leaving his wife. Perhaps she represented the bonds which still tied him to his present environment. Or maybe it went deeper than that: he couldn't be sure.
But now that Shirley had left him, he knew that he simply had to make some sort of break from Jean, even if it was only a temporary estrangement. The pressures were again building up in his mind, he could feel his head beginning to ache with the taunting of his newly-awakened ambitions, insistent and demanding.
As he drove, having to slow down now as the homeward-bound commuters caused delays at the roundabouts, Michael thought back to the previous evening and his last encounter with Shirley. She was a girl he'd met one lunch hour; a pretty, if only moderately intelligent young typist whom he picked up in a snack bar without quite realising what he was doing.
He had asked her to pass the sugar bowl and a few minutes later they were in conversation: Michael had never been able to pinpoint the exact moment when his pleasantries turned into flirtation. But when they'd finished their coffee and left together, he knew that for the first time in his life he had calmly and in a public place asked a strange girl to have dinner with him.
The event was so out of character that Michael, during the rest of the afternoon, half-believed he had imagined the meeting. But Shirley was waiting for him that evening in the saloon bar of a pub where they'd arranged to rendezvous and he found himself chatting quite easily to her, as if he'd been doing this sort of thing for years.
The irony was that Michael had frequently spent weekends away from home, letting Jean think that he was sleeping with other women, for years! Now his pretence had suddenly become a reality…
For a week or two they were very happy together. He took her to the theatre, to some of the best restaurants in London and she took him back to her bed-sitting-room in the Fulham Road: a rather dingy, untidy dwelling in one of those ugly and vast houses which abound in Chelsea's “wrong side”.
He grew to love the room, though, because to him it represented the kind of disorderly chaos for which his soul yearned: the complete antithesis to his usual surroundings. He liked to sit on the shabby, Victorian sofa which she'd bought cheaply at a junk shop. He liked to climb the uncarpeted stairs to her room on the third floor and pretend that he lived in the house permanently; that the stockbrokers' and Jean and Cathy and his house in Surrey didn't exist.
And most of all, Michael liked to take Shirley to bed with the sounds of a party reverberating overhead. The music and the voices added an atmosphere of orgy-like daring to their love-making, making him feel that he was at last catching up with the missed opportunities of his youth.
But last night he had seen the room for the cheap, unattractive slum which it really was. The peeling wallpaper, the smell of cooking wafting down the hall, the pathetic attempts Shirley had made to brighten it up…
“How can you stand it here?” he heard himself asking her. “It's so dirty, so sordid — and the people all around you: they're nothing more than a bunch of beatniks and layabouts! You've got quite a good job, you can afford something better than this, surely?”
Shirley had looked at him in surprise. His criticism had come right out of the blue and it shocked her to hear so much supercilious distaste in his voice. She felt at home here; more than that — she wanted to belong in this neighbourhood. It gave her a sense of living in a bohemian community and although she worked as a typist in the City, Shirley entertained hopes of one day throwing up her job and trying to make the grade as an artist.
She had been to art school but so far hadn't been able to summon the courage to show her work to a gallery. Michael had seen some of her pictures; they were modern abstracts and he professed a polite admiration for them while suppressing his private opinion that they were hideous daubs scarcely worth the canvas they were painted on.
Poor Shirley… Michael allowed himself to feel a momentary regret for the sad, lost little girl who would probably never leave her office desk. She would type invoices for the rest of her life (or until she married and settled down in a terraced house somewhere in the suburbs). Her brief artistic flowering would die a painful death, strangled by her own lack of talent and the pressures of the mass media — which exhorted her and thousands of girls like her to live a “normal, healthy, everyday life”.
As soon as he'd voiced his opinion of her home, Michael wanted to bite the words back. Shirley wasn't so very far removed from him after all, he realised. She, too, was struggling to escape from her background — and, like him, she seemed doomed to an early failure.
Before she could reply, he reached out quickly for her hand and pressed her fingers gently. “I'm sorry', he said quietly. “I didn't mean to say that, Shirley. Honestly — I apologise”.
Shirley had shrugged both his remarks away as if they didn't concern her. “What do I care?” she told him. “If you don't think much of it, that's up to you!
He lifted her chin until her lips were in line with his and kissed her. Her body shivered slightly against him and he knew for certain that she had been hurt by his words. He squeezed her tightly, his hands on her backs of her shoulders, fingers feeling her flesh through the thin material of the girl's dress.
Her mouth slowly grew more responsive under the pressure of Michael's lips. She began to pant gently, thrusting her body forward until he felt the hardness of her crotch pushing against his prick.
“Darling!” he breathed when they at last broke for air. “Oh, my darling!” (Wanting to tell her that he loved her but finding the words obstinately sticking in his throat).
Her eyes were still closed, her lips moist from the kiss, Shirley's passion was easily aroused, no more than a sufficiently prolonged kiss serving to make the girl misty-eyed and eager for further intimacies.
Michael's cock stirred upwards as he looked down into her face. She was so very young, not much older than Cathy, in fact. He couldn't help thinking of her, all the same, as an object rather than a person. Shirley represented no more to him than a pliable, beautifully curved body which merged with his and brought him a sweet satisfaction.
Her identity as a separate individual, her existence outside her usefulness as an instrument of pleasure, was vague and lost to him. Small wonder, Michael thought, that the words “I love you” wouldn't come to his lips. They were meaningless… an empty phrase which merely seemed appropriate in this situation: much as “I beg your pardon” was obligatory if you bumped someone in the street.
However, this realisation, far from diminishing his lust, served to intensify it. He slipped his hands down until they encompassed Shirley's buttocks, then raised the girl off her feet — holding her tightly against his body, supporting her by pressing his fingers into the giving cheeks of her bottom.
She wound her arms about his neck, opening her mouth and beginning to nibble softly at his ear lobe as he carried her to the bed.
Michael set her down so that Shirley was standing on the sheets, her breasts level with his face. Keeping his hands on her buttocks — starting to massage the softness of her curves with wandering fingers — he rubbed his cheek against them, feeling the globes flatten slightly and press warmly into his nose. He could hear the girl's heartbeat, thudding with a muffled but distinct rhythm next to his ear.
Shirley was wearing one of her briefest mini-dresses. Its hem scarcely covered her stocking tops, and now that Michael had lifted her up onto the bed the girl's suspender studs were completely exposed — the taut retainers glittering metallically.
He could feel the clips on the inside of her thighs pressing against his stomach. Their pressure excited him, and he twitched her dress higher — hoisting the thin print around Shirley's waist.
Instead of returning his hands to their position on the girl's buttocks, Michael sidled them down a little until his fingers touched the bareness of her skin between her panties and stockings. They caressed the fullness of her thighs, fondling the sleek swell of flesh until Shirley tightened her grip around his neck and began to push her hips backwards and forwards: writhing herself passionately against him.
His fingers slipped further downwards, now touching the exciting silk of the girl's stocking tops. He rubbed them, his fingers tingling as they moved over and around the tightly stretched hose.
Slowly, Shirley let her thighs open, giving him access to the warm, sweet skin of her inner legs. Michael ran his hands firmly around her, stretching his fingertips upwards until they felt the tight swathe of Shirley's panties.
He poked them beneath the elastic and touched the deliciously soft flesh of the girl's bare bottom. The
