Chapel Drive, were plentiful and in full bloom. The well-kept and striking orderliness of the grounds made it one of the most visually satisfying campuses in the United States.
Casanova found the fragrant air intoxicating as he strolled between tall graystone gates and onto the university’s West Campus. It was a few minutes past seven. He had come for one reason only—to hunt. The entire process was exhilarating and irresistible. Impossible to stop once he had begun. This was foreplay. Lovely in every way.
I’m like a killer shark, with a human brain, and even a heart,
Casanova thought, as he walked.
I am a predator without peer, a thinking predator.
He believed that men loved the hunt—lived for it, in fact—though most wouldn’t admit it. A man’s eyes never stopped searching for beautiful, sensual women, or for sexy men and boys, for that matter. All the more at a prime location like the Duke campus, or the campuses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or North Carolina State University at Raleigh, or many others he’d visited throughout the Southeast.
Just look at them!
The slightly uppity Duke coeds were among the very finest and most
“contemporary”
American women. Even in dirty cutoffs, or ridiculous holey 501s, or baggy hobo’s pants, they were something to see, to watch, occasionally to photograph, to fantasize about endlessly.
Nothing could be finer,
Casanova thought, whistling a bar of the beamish old tune about a life of leisure in the Carolinas.
He casually sipped an icy Coca-Cola as he watched the students at play. He was playing a game of skill himself—several complicated games at once, actually. The games had become his life. The fact that he had a “respectable” job, another life, no longer mattered.
He checked
each passing woman
who even looked like a faint possibility for his collection. He studied shapely young coeds, older women professors, and female visitors in the Duke Blue Devils T-shirts that seemed de rigueur for outsiders.
He licked his lips in anticipation. Here was something splendid up ahead…
A tall, slender, exquisite black woman leaned against a shapely old oak in the Edens Quad. She was reading the Duke
Chronicle,
which she’d folded into thirds. He loved the smooth shine of her brown skin, her artistically braided hair. But he moved on.
Yes, men are hunters by nature,
he was thinking. He was off in his own world again. “Faithful” husbands were oh-so-careful and furtive with their looks. Fresh-eyed boys of eleven and twelve appeared very innocent and playful. Grandfathers pretended to be above the fray, and were just “cute” with their affection. But Casanova knew they were all watching, constantly selecting, obsessed with mastering the hunt from puberty to the grave.
It was a biological necessity, no? He was quite certain of that. Women nowadays were demanding that men accept the fact that their female biological clocks were ticking… well, with men, it was their biological
cocks
that were ticking.
Constantly ticking, those cocks.
That was a fact of nature, too. Everywhere he went, at virtually any time of day or night, he could feel the pulsing beat inside.
Tick-cock. Tick-cock.
Tick-cock!
Tick-cock!
A beautiful honey-blond coed sat crosslegged on the grass intersecting his path. She was reading a paperback, Karl Jasper’s
Philosophy of Existence.
The rock group Smashing Pumpkins was contributing mantralike riffs from a portable CD player. Casanova smiled to himself.
Tick-cock!
The hunt was relentless for him. He was Priapus for the nineties. The difference between him and so many gutless modern men was that he acted on his natural impulses.
He relentlessly searched out a great beauty—and then he took her! What an outrageously simple idea.
What a compellingly modern horror story.
He watched two petite Japanese coeds chowing down on greasy North Carolina barbecue from the new Crooks Corner II restaurant in Durham.
They
looked