'No, but Ralph explained them to me,' he lied.
'Why in the world would Ralph give you photos like that, Howie? Dirty ones, I mean?'
'Oh, they're not dirty,' Howard said quickly. 'Just… just daring, that's all.'
Cindy frowned again. She felt a small sense of foreboding, as if there were something Howard was not telling her, as if there was some motive behind his boss having given him these 'daring' photographs. She thought back to the previous evening, and to the snapshots Howard had taken of her — with her skirt hiked up and her panties showing; thought back to how excited he had been, how obviously aroused by the sight of her posing so provocatively before the eye of the camera and in its sixty-second lasting capture of it. A small involuntary tremor coursed through her soft young body. She must never let Howard do that again, take pictures of her like that; it was wrong and it was wicked, and it had no place in a happy, fully consummated marriage such as theirs.
She said, 'Well, if they're that kind of pictures, you take them right back to Ralph. You tell him we don't want anything like that. I don't understand him at all, giving them to you in the first place.'
'He, uh, was just trying to be friendly, I guess,' said Howard, wanting to end the discussion as quickly as possible. 'But I'll take them back, don't worry.'
'I won't honey,' his young wife said. She put her arm around him, softening. 'Come on. Let's eat before the casserole gets cold.'
They ate a leisurely dinner, and Howard managed to steer the conversation to many things of little consequence, so that Cindy would forget about the manila envelope. He had slipped it into their bedroom as she was setting the table, putting it on the nightstand by their bed. Now, if only she wouldn't remember it and make him take it with him when he went back to Auto Circus tonight…
She didn't remember. Howard fixed them each another martini after dinner, gulped his down, and told her he had better get back to work — to relax and enjoy her drink. Then he kissed her, and she whispered, 'Come home early and love me tonight, Howie darling.' He said that he would, kissed her again, said good-bye, and left quickly, feeling once more that odd mixture of guilt and mounting excitement as he backed the car out of their driveway.
Cindy, smiling happily and with a warm glow spreading through her from the martinis, sat back on the divan in the living room and sipped the remaining liquid from her glass. She stretched languidly, thinking, I feel so good tonight, so warm and loved and happy. I'm a lucky woman, a very lucky woman, to have a wonderful husband like Howie, who has a very good job and is a good provider and is a very, very, very good lover.
She giggled softly, and a warm, pleasant ache began between her tender young thighs. She sighed then, squeezing her legs tightly together, wishing Howie hadn't had to go back to work tonight. They could have had another drink together, and then gone to bed, as they did sometimes, and made love for hours and hours, slow and sweet and good. That was the kind of mood she was in tonight, the mood to make love very, very slowly for a long, long time…
Well, Howard would be home at midnight or so and they could make love then. She would have to content herself with waiting, maybe watching a little television and, yes why not, having another drink. She was feeling a little audacious tonight, and even though she knew her absolute limit without getting drunk was two martinis in one evening, she decided that, by golly, she was going to make herself a third!
She mixed the drink in the kitchen, humming softly and a little intoxicatedly, and then decided that she would watch television in the bedroom. She carried the drink in there, switched on the old portable set on its coaster stand by the dresser (now that Howie had gotten a raise at Auto Circus, maybe they could afford the color set they'd wanted for so long), and lay down on the bed.
It was when she reached over to set down the martini glass on the nightstand that she noticed the manila envelope lying there.
She frowned mightily. Oh, damn! Now why hadn't Howie taken that back with him to give to Ralph like she'd asked him? Why had he brought it in here to the bedroom, for heaven's sake?
She propped herself up on one elbow and took another sip of her drink. She kept looking at the envelope, lying there sealed, and she began to wonder, disinterestedly at first and then with increasing attraction, what the pictures inside were like. Howard had said they were similar to the ones he had taken of her last night, daring and naughty probably, like those were. Some friends of Ralph's, he had said. Did other wives allow their husbands to take pictures of them, as she had allowed Howard last night? Did they — would they dare even go farther than she had, actually undressing to bra and panties or even to… well, to the buff?
Cindy sipped again of her martini. The liquor was beginning to affect her now, in several different ways. Her ardor of a few minutes earlier, instead of waning, seemed to have gained intensity, so that she felt a moistening down between her legs, flowing out to dampen her inner thighs; and she felt, toes a boldness that she had never experienced before, an irrational desire to do something she shouldn't do — something like opening that manila envelope and looking at the pictures inside.
I wonder just how naughty those photos are, she thought. I'll bet they're very naughty, and if they are, I should have Howie speak to Ralph about giving them to us. But I can't do that until I know for myself what they're like.
Impulsively, then, stifling another slightly tipsy giggle, Cindy reached out and grasped the manila envelope. Her fingers fumbled at the sealed flap, finally got it open; and then she was drawing out the newspaper wrapped photos and holding them on her lap. She let them lie there, on the warm silken mound of her lower abdomen, as she drained the last of the martini. Then she opened the newspaper, saw the photos, and held them up to her slightly blurred eyes, squinting at them very close.
Her first reaction was one of shocked horror. She blinked rapidly several times, her eyes seemingly held transfixed by the full-color carnality which she held in her hands. Her brain was spinning with the combined forces of startlement and undiluted gin.
My… my God! she thought. This is… it's filthy! It's pornography, that's what it is, plain and simple pornography!
She wanted to cast the offending photos from her, but a curious perversity made her grip them more tightly between her fingers, made her eyes remain fastened to their glossy detail. The top snapshot showed a sweet- looking brunette straddling a dark-haired man; both of them were nude, with their privates fully exposed to the camera, and his… his penis was pushed halfway up into her open vagina!
Cindy swallowed hard, looking at the expression on the young woman's face. It wax one of sheer, unadulterated ecstasy, lids drooped, mouth parted and moist, with the tip of her wet pink tongue showing; she seemed to be oblivious to the camera, caught up in the sexual frenzy of the moment, of the feeling of the man's hardened shaft imbedded deep within her cuntal passage. And she was manipulating her own breast, squeezing it passionately in her ardor…
Staring at the angelic young girl's obvious enjoyment, Cindy felt a quickening of her breath, a fluttering in her lower belly. The inside of her mouth was dry, and she ran her pink tongue over her lips several times, trying to dispel the arid, cottony taste.
Her now-trembling fingers pulled the first photo aside and the second came into view. She gasped, and a little spiral of unwanted heat wended its way upward through her warmly secreting loins, into her stomach and chest, hardening the firm, ruby crests of her snowy breasts. A man, distinguished and older, crouched between the widespread thighs of a small, well-proportioned blonde, his long wet, seemingly hard, tongue curled out to flick over the swollen naked pubic area and the erect clitoris of the passion-tensed girl!
A wave of Puritan revulsion took hold of Cindy, and again she wanted to cast the offending photos from her. But again, she did not; again, she stared at the photo, at the man, at his tongue touching the innermost secret of the blonde girl. Oral sex! Perversion! cried the half-intoxicated mind of the young wife. The very same terrible thing Howie wanted to do to me so many times! Oh, God, and I'll bet that if I flip over to another photo it win show the disgusting sight of some woman with her mouth around a man's penis…
A cascade of shame flowed through her, causing her to flush a violent crimson. She was no better than the… the lascivious people in the photos! Thinking filthy thoughts, working herself into an impossible froth… Suddenly, she wished again that her husband were home. She was aroused now, aroused by the gin and the thought of lovemaking and yes, aroused by the perversity of the Polaroid snapshots which she held in her quaking hands.
'No! No!' she moaned aloud, but even as the words left her lips she was pulling aside the top photo, revealing the one which lay beneath…
And there it was! Just as she had feared — a girl, a young-raven-haired teen-age girl, with her lips firmly
