The horror expert

by Frank Belknap Long

He could feel more than just the texture of her skin. Every movement of her body, every impassioned ripple of her flesh, increased the intimacy of her embrace and made him lose his head completely.

It was over almost before it had begun and although it had been sudden and maddening, tempting them both to abandon all restraint, he had found the strength to gently but firmly grasp her by the wrists and prevent her complete surrender. He felt cheated, tortured for an instant and then a wave of relief swept over him, because what had almost happened would have been a very serious commitment and he was not the kind of man who could take complete physical intimacy lightly.

Casual love-making was impossible for him. It never failed to stir him to the depths, to awaken impulses of loyalty and devotion, to place him under an obligation. He was perhaps different from the general run of males, but if he had gone out on the street and picked up some pathetic little prostitute and gone home with her the relationship would not have been entirely sordid and physical.

He sat now on the edge of the bed as if turned to stone, watching her get up with shining eyes and a deep flush on her face, cross the room to the door and go out, closing the door very softly behind her. He'd known what she was thinking. Next time it will be completely wonderful and he won't feel awkward and embarrassed afterwards and not know what to say.

She'd be thinking that, but it wouldn't be the truth. He had no intention of letting it happen again, of going even as far as he had before he'd found the strength to save himself from absolute disaster.

A moment or two before, with the returned manuscript still unopened in his hand, he'd had a momentary impulse to let himself go and accept the consequences, even if they would have been as binding in his scale of values as a marriage ceremony. He could never have walked out and left her—unless love died and they both agreed that the relationship had deteriorated and ceased to be important.

But all that was changed now. He'd opened the envelope and the letter had changed the world for him and if she hadn't thrown her arms around him and kissed him so passionately when he'd merely asked her for a dinner date in a moment of unreasoning exaltation....

It had been a physical response solely, the kind of response which any normal male with the blood warm in his veins would have been unable to exercise complete and instant control over, no matter how great his strength of will. It had been instinctive, the touching off of sex's trigger-mechanism in his brain, the automatic arousal which yielding softness, sweetness, femininity in all of its rapturous abandonment made inevitable in the male.

There was no reason for him to reproach himself or feel guilty about it. If for a moment he'd abandoned all restraint, carried her to the bed, and seared her lips with kisses which she had welcomed, demanded, insisted upon—had not the tightening of her arms, the almost convulsive straining of her body against him proved that she had been equally aroused?—if for a moment he'd become almost savagely primitive in his love-making, was that something which called for sackcloth and ashes and the covering of his head, as if he were a grieving widow instead of the completely normal, robustly endowed man he knew himself to be?

Hardly. Since she had been so completely eager and willing the cynical and unjust could brand his restraint as amusing if they wished and regard him as something of a fool. But he had his own standards and preferred to maintain them. An old maxim came almost unbidden into his mind. "They say what they say—let them say."