"Swell. See you at nine. 'Bye now, till then."
The phone clicked before Dolly could say anything more, so she cradled it.
Mack Irby, who had made himself comfortable in an over-stuffed chair, looked at her with amusement. "You wouldn't of had to stall the guy, Doll," he said. "He could of come right away. Me, I chase easy. I'm on the free list."
"Damn you, Mack honey. You're not on the free list. You are the free list. And the reason I didn't tell him to come right away is I didn't want him to come right away."
Dolly didn't mind Mack kidding her about the free list, but that was because Mack was special; if anyone else had ever said anything like that, she'd have bawled the hell out of him—and meant it.
Dolly Mason was not a prostitute. She'd never taken money from a man and never would. She earned her own living, as a beauty operator. And it was a fairly good living because she owned a one-third interest in the beauty shop and shared in the profits. Her two-room apartment—living room and bedroom, with a kitchenette off the first and a bath off the second—was in a good building in a good neighborhood. Despite the fact that it was fairly expensive as were her clothes and her standards of living in other directions, she had a modest balance in the bank. Her living standards would not, of course, have been quite so high if she did not accept presents—some of which she used and some of which she converted into money—from a score of men, but she would still have lived comfortably. And why shouldn't she accept presents from men—for doing something she thoroughly enjoyed and would have done for free if it were not for the fact that there were men, more men than she could possibly take care of, who would gladly bring her presents for doing what she most enjoyed.
Dolly Mason had been graduated five years ago from high school in a small town a hundred miles downstate with a reputation that made it quite inadvisable for her to stay in that town. If she hadn't had sex relations with every boy in her class it hadn't been her fault, and she'd made up the deficit by having slept with quite a number of older men.
Fortunately for Dolly her father had died just a week after her graduation, leaving Dolly—since her mother had died years before—the sole beneficiary of a few thousand dollars in insurance. She had left town and had come to the city immediately after the funeral. She had kept her capital mostly intact by working part time while she took a beauty course, had worked two years as an operator for someone else to gain experience, and then had used what was left of her capital to buy her way into a small but profitable suburban beauty shop.
She liked any and all men, but since she had a wide choice of them she limited her friendships (as she thought of them) to ones who were reasonably young, reasonably attractive, and reasonably prosperous. They had to be reasonably generous in giving her presents from time to time. And, no matter how generous they were, they had to be reasonably good in bed.
Of all men she liked Mack Irby best. She'd met him when she'd been working about a year as a beauty operator and about a year before she'd bought into the shop. She'd thought at first that she was in love with him and for a few weeks had actually eschewed promiscuity and given herself only to him. But love, to Dolly, meant only that she enjoyed sex with Mack more than with anyone else. She'd probably have married Mack during the first week or so that she'd known him if he'd asked her, but fortunately he hadn't, for she soon found out that no one man could possibly keep her happy. Not even Mack, who was more virile than most men.