The Riddle Of The Third Mile Read Online Free PDF

feelm first, OK?’
    Reluctantly, Browne-Smith did as he was bidden, taking his seat in an upright chair in front of the projector, and seeking to prepare himself for the voyeuristic aperitif. Clearly the pattern of events she’d suggested was not an unusual one; she, doubtless, must occasionally feel the need for some erotic stimulus. It was rather sad, this last fact, but he was too intelligent a man to feel surprised.
    The scenes now witnessed on the white patch of wall beside the yellow curtaining were wilder by a dozen leagues than the few X-certificated films that Browne-Smith had paid to see at the ABC cinema during the Oxford vacations. It was a pity that the woman wasn’t seated close to him; but (as she’d explained) unless she continually made some slight adjustments to the focusing mechanism, the technicolour delineation tended to drift out of true.
    It was all so strangely deja vu.
    A man, in a smartly cut business suit; a beautiful blonde in a full-length, purple gown; a few intimate drinks on a multi-cushioned settee; the man’s hand slipping slowly inside the low-cut bodice and hoisting there from a bronzed, globed breast; then a teasingly slow, provocative undress on the part of the blonde, followed by much mutual grasping and gasping-before a finale that was fully orchestrated by climactic groans and an energetic spurting of semen.
    The whirring, clicking projector was now switched off, and he felt her hands on his shoulders from behind.
    ‘You like eet again?’ She came round and sat on his knees. ‘Or would you rather ‘ave me?’
    He swallowed the first ‘You!’, but managed the second.
    ‘There ees a long zeep at the back of my dress-that’s eet. Just pull down-pull! Yes, that’s eet!’
    Browne-Smith felt the sinuous movement of her hips pressing down on him as his fingers ventured across her naked back; and then she got up and walked over to the bed.
    ‘Come and let me undress you.’
    Her back was turned away from him as she shrugged the dress off her shoulders, bent down to slip off her black, high-heeled shoes, stepped professionally out of her dress, and folded it neatly over the chair at the foot of the bed. Then she turned fully towards him, and he felt an enormously urgent need to take her immediately; but still she teetered on the brink of things, and he thought of the mercilessly tortured Tantalus and the illicit grapes that dangled just above his lips.
    ‘One more lettk drink, per’aps?’
    Browne-Smith, now almost in a delirium of anticipation, watched her as she walked over to the cabinet, watched her as she poured the two drinks, watched her as her beautifully formed breasts bounced towards him once more.
    ‘Just lie there a leetle meenite. You can ‘ave me very soon.’
    She had disappeared through the only other door in the room, doubtless (judging by the flushing of water) a bathroom. And he, for his part, lay there almost fully clothed upon the yellow sheets, wondering in a hazily distanced sort of way just what was going on. Although his mouth seemed dry as the Sahara, he put down his drink untasted on the bedside-table, and for a while his mind grew clearer. Why had she used the other bottle of Glenfiddich? Perhaps… perhaps it had been watered down a bit? Just as the Bursar always said at a Gaudy: ‘Let them have the good stuff first.’
    When, after what seemed an eternity, she returned, he watched her again, leaning half-upright on his right elbow. But his request was the oddest she had ever heard.
    ‘Have you got any sort of cream, or something? My lips are awfully dry.’
    She fetched her handbag from the settee, opened the flap, and delved around for a few seconds. Then, unscrewing a circular container, she leaned over him, her breasts suspended only inches from his eyes, and smoothly smeared some cream along his lips.
    ‘That ees better, non? Dreenk up, darleeng!’
    She unfastened his tie; then unfastened the front of his shirt, one button at a time, at