The Erection Set by Mickey Spillane Page A

to. I know all the tricks, positions and erogenous zones and I’ll be a real terror when the time comes. Only right now I still have the little goodie that makes me an unpenetrated virgin and I’m going to keep it that way.”
    She felt his hand slip away from hers slowly, his eyes uncertain. “You are a ... a ...”
    â€œLesbian?”
    He nodded.
    â€œNo, though I allowed myself the pleasure of experimenting in that direction several times. Does that startle you?”
    Apparently it did. The bewilderment touched his mouth and he reached for his drink again. “But ... when you could have had a man ...”
    â€œI have,” she said firmly, “but not in the primary circumstance. I have felt and tasted several men. There was great mutual enjoyment. Have I been explicit enough? There has even been penetration of another nature I found extremely satisfactory. So no, I am not a Lesbian, I am not frigid, I am not sexually abnormal. I am simply hanging on to an asset a man might consider quite valuable someday.”
    Raul finished the drink, found an empty spot on the end table beside him and put the glass down. “American women,” he said. “You are quite shocking.”
    â€œAt my age I can afford to be,” Sharon told him. She deliberately leaned forward, knowing he was able to see the full sweep of her breasts beneath her dress in the movement. The slippery feel of the fabric made her nipples thrust forward prominently. “Now, why don’t you practice your erection on someone more appreciative.”
    Somehow he managed to contain his frustration and rose to bow in a continental manner. She took his fingers in a gentle handshake. “I feel sorry for you, Sharon Cass,” he said.
    She smiled again, a flash of amusement in her eyes. “I feel sorry for you, Raul. You know what you are missing and there is no possible chance of getting it at all.”
    â€œNot quite true, my dear.”
    â€œQuite true, Raul. I would deball you before you could rape me. My thirty-two years have been very athletic and, like I said, I know all the tricks ... even those.”
    His exit was graceful, she thought, for someone who had to revise all his thinking. Tonight he’d have some woman tucked under silken sheets next to him, wondering if somewhere along the primrose path he had lost his touch. His performance wouldn’t be up to par at all and tomorrow he’d begin to worry. So he’d try for her again and lose the battle again and the decline would begin. Like the gross income chart on S. C. Cable’s wall behind his desk.
    â€œWould you really deball him?”
    It was a funny voice, oddly scratchy with a strange accent she couldn’t quite place, a Brooklyn voice with the New Yorkese deliberately rubbed out. She half turned and looked at him, then smiled because he was out of place somehow and she couldn’t tell why either. She let all the reasons compute in her analytical mind and decided that he was too big in the shoulders and chest for one thing, and his hair too short for another. It was what they used to call a crew cut. His black suit was new, but molded from a different era, as if he were conscious of only one style and couldn’t care less for what the “in” crowd had adopted. He looks like an eagle, she thought.
    Suddenly she was back in front of the mirror again. She felt the tiny blonde hairs rise on the backs of her forearms and a prickle go across her shoulders. It was like dropping into an abstract vortex of time and sound and colors she couldn’t understand at all. Her stomach muscles seemed to tighten until juices were being squeezed right out of her. Inside her mind a faraway voice said, “I have a funny, funny feeling.” And she answered back, “No. It’s silly and childish. It never will really happen.”
    â€œWell?” he asked.
    â€œIt wouldn’t have been very