Bill Pierce was not enjoying this July. Many representatives were on vacation. Of course, many doctors were on vacation, too. But representatives had their lists of doctors whom they saw, and getting the doctors actually at work covered by the representatives actually at work was a pain. To add to that, doctors often didn't tell the representatives when they would be on vacation.

That meant that Representative X spent time going to Doctor Y's office to find it closed. Or he went to the offices of Practice Z to find that half the doctors were out and the other half had patients lined up who had already waited for hours. That didn't give Representative X much time to visit the doctors whom a vacationing representative would normally see.

When Bill finally got out of the office and headed home, the streets were baking. The EL platform was blasted by a furnace-temperature wind. The car was supposed to be air-conditioned, but the weather and the heat from the passengers' bodies defeated that. And the car was full of gossip about Watergate -- something about tapes and the White House. Had the Democrats been bugging the President while everybody was bitching about a few low-level peons exceeding their authority and bugging the Democrats? If so, the conversations he overheard didn't turn on the Democrats as one would expect.

At least, it would be cool at home, and Carolyn would have cooked some good food. She always apologized for leftovers, but her cooking tasted good the second time around. No reason for her to slave over a hot stove on a day like this. But, when he got there, the apartment was empty. He hung up his suit coat and went looking for her. Almost always, she heard him come in, but she could be deep in her studies and miss anything. She wasn't in the bedroom; she wasn't in her office, and the place felt like a sauna; she wasn't in the kitchen, and nothing was cooking there, either. There was no note, and the only message on the answering machine was a phone solicitor.

Well, with the way her office felt, she was smart to be out gathering information. They had his old air conditioner in their bedroom -- the new, larger one was in the living room window. Maybe they should buy another for Carolyn's office. They weren't made of money, but she wasn't made of asbestos, either.

He worried about Carolyn. If something had happened, he might not know for hours. But, really, that was borrowing trouble. She probably was just late. He settled down to watch television.

The White House tapes were recorded on Nixon's orders. Well, that was no huge problem. It was his house -- his office, really. You couldn't tell how minor it was by all the talking, though. Partly, that was the newsmen making their best story of the day as exciting as possible. More, it was Agnew's "Nattering Nabobs of Negativism" getting all the digs in they could at the President that the people had chosen over their dovish choice.

He turned off the set. There might be more news, but the programs wouldn't cover it tonight. He headed for the refrigerator for a beer. Carolyn would swallow all this garbage. She was always ready to put the worst interpretation of what Nixon did. Where was the woman, anyway? It was late, and he was hungry.

When put the beer bottle in the garbage, he took down a glass and a bottle of bourbon. Normally, he saved the hard stuff for company, but this wasn't a normal day.

The bottle was lighter when Carolyn finally came home.

"Sorry about this. Last interview of the day turned into a gold mine. Have you eaten?" She wanted to know whether he had eaten. He'd been sitting here worrying about her, and she wanted to know whether he'd eaten.

"Eaten what?"

"I told you that dinner would be meat loaf." She was trying for a reasonable tone. She might have tried for some reasonable words, instead. An apology beyond a blithe "sorry about that" would have been a good start.

"You also told me that you'd fix it." That was the bottom line. She'd said that she would fix dinner, and she hadn't.

"Well," she evaded, "I don't expect you to be able to cook. That takes the ability to understand a cook book. I do expect you to be able to warm up two slices of meatloaf." Now she was being patronizing. Pretending the issue was his intelligence and cooking abilities rather than her performance on her promises. And who had cooked the breakfast she'd eaten that morning? She'd never mention that.

"Look, I work all day and bring home a paycheck. I do some of the housework. We agreed that you'd have this year for your dissertation, but also that you'd take care of the house." But agreements with Carolyn were only a basis for further negotiations. "I don't give a damn about the cleaning, but I do expect to eat dinner -- to, at least, see dinner cooking -- when I get home. I call you when I'll be late. And you're late for no other reason than you decided that your work was more interesting at the moment. And you don't even call." That was the real point. He'd been worried about her. He called because he thought of them as connected; she didn't call because she thought of him as a convenience.

"I'm real grateful that you condescend enough to set the table when I cook a meal. I suppose your neglecting that tonight is to teach me how much effort you make. Well, I'm not impressed." She set the table, as if his setting the table would have made dinner closer to on time -- as if, indeed, he'd refused to set the table. "I've just spent an hour fighting traffic, I'm frazzled, I got a huge dump of information verbally that I haven't had time to write down. One of us is sitting down relaxing, and it's not me."

Poor Carolyn! She'd just spent an afternoon driving around in his car -- his air-conditioned car -- gathering information for her dissertation research, and the traffic had her frazzled.

Of course, if she'd started home on time, the traffic wouldn't have been as bad. Of course, if she hadn't married him, she would have been teaching in some junior college in Podunk instead of having her days free for the research. Of course, she hadn't told him that she would be late. Of course, she had agreed to cook on all but her crunch times, and this was the easiest of times in her schedule. Of course, she had announced last night that she'd prepare left-over meat loaf for tonight. But she sailed right past those inconvenient facts to get to the hardness of her struggle.

"And I am impressed. Look how fast you're working. And it's only an hour after the food was supposed to be ready. And such lavish attention to the preparation, too. Warm up the meal in one frying pan."

"Well, I never claimed that operating the stove was an esoteric art. I even implied that even a man who needs someone else to find a file for him can learn to turn on the gas." Now she was hitting below the belt. He was a hard-working executive, not the drone she pretended he was.

"I don't need someone else to find a file for me. They find the files because taking care of files is their job. It's just that I'm used to people who actually do their jobs -- not to people who decide that something else is more interesting for the moment and expect me to do their jobs for them."

"Do you want to eat?" she asked as soon as she'd set out the food. "Or do you intend to get all your calories from alcohol?" He'd been waiting for her to sit down, but she made politeness a sign of alcoholism. He took his food.

"Well you drink, and don't pretend you don't." She couldn't make that claim to him. Indeed, at the wedding, she'd downed glasses of champagne in front of people who had never seen her smoke.

"The question, Bill, is not whether but how much and when."

"You drink and nag me about my drinking. You smoke, and I don't. But you don't hear me nagging you," he pointed out.

"I smoke in my office so as not to annoy you. I'd have been home earlier if I hadn't taken time to smoke a cigarette when I wasn't in the car." And that was the first time she'd mentioned that. Did that mean that she'd taken a cigarette beak while the traffic she complained of got worse? Anyway, her containment of the tobacco odor was far from perfect.

"And the smell doesn't go from your sacred office into the rest of the house? The door is open, even."

"The door is open because the room is an oven in the summer with it closed. The afternoon sun shines right in."

"When I'm home, you shut me out." And that was the real problem. She had her life, and he wasn't invited. She had her vice, and she was glad to share the stink of it. But, he'd be happy with -- well, tolerant of -- the stink if she didn't shut him out of so much else. "When I'm not home, you let the smoke into the rest of the house."

"The door is closed to keep the smoke away from your oh-so-sensitive nose. It also allows you your pleasures while I'm at work at my job. Which doesn't stop when the clock hits five like some people's jobs do. You can watch TV while I'm collating information and looking up locations on the map. I notice that you didn't watch while I was gone and not here to be distracted by the sound." He worked a forty-hour week, longer when necessary. He did what other people expected him to do when they expected him to do it. If those other people were fewer than they had been, it was because he'd worked his way up. Sure, she didn't stop at five. How often did she begin at nine? Anyway, what he did while she was late doing her dissertation research wasn't something he was answerable for.

"The only thing on television tonight is your pet liberals beating up on Dick Nixon. That isn't news; they've been doing it since he was VP in '52."

"Poor Bill. Your idol has feet of clay. He not only bugs his enemies, he bugs his minions." And no other president made recordings? Not Washington or Lincoln, for obvious reasons, but every one since Roosevelt had.

"He was making a record of what he said. Your pals always try to twist his words. Why shouldn't he have records of every word so he can set the record straight?"

"Fine. I wish I had brought a tape recorder with me today. But, if I had, I'd have told the guy I was recording. That's what you do. That's what honest people do." She was bringing rules over from her area into general life. If he'd ask her to always dress like a secretary was expected to do, she'd blow a gasket.

"When you talk to the president of the United States, you're making an official report or an official recommendation. You should be willing to stand by your words. You don't have the inalienable right to remember that you'd recommended something else." He could tell that he'd won that one when she changed the subject.

"And those aren't the country's few liberals you hear talking. They're the guys who are in the business of reporting facts. That's what gets you on the enemies list -- reporting facts."

"You mispronounced 'distorting.'" And that was what they did, distort facts, when they weren't making things up out of whole cloth.

The conversation continued like that until Carolyn served herself, but not him, some cherries for dessert and flounced off to her office. This time, she closed the door. Indeed, the slam was so loud that they must have heard it in the next block.

He dipped one of the cherries she'd left in a new glass of bourbon. The taste wasn't bad. He dished himself up a bowl of the remainder of the cherries, and tried the opposite. Bourbon-flavored cherries weren't bad either. Her door was still closed. She was shutting him out on a night when he didn't have any other pleasures available. Well, she'd have to go to bed some time. He poured one more drink, put what remained of the bottle back, and looked at the table. Fuck it. If she wanted to boast that she did all the housework, let her do the dishes for once. He, after all, washed the breakfast dishes with the rest. He took his drink into the bedroom. The temperature was a little high, the air conditioning being off. He turned it on, and stripped. He finished the drink sitting on his side of the bed. He put his pillow on top of hers and turned off the lamp. He went to sleep with his head on her side and his feet on his. She'd wake him when she came in -- that or sleep with something hanging off the bed.

He woke when the light blazed on.

"Huh?" There was no need for that much light, certainly not when he was sleeping on his back staring into the fixture.

"Move over to your own side." He started moving, taking only his own pillow with him. Then he saw how she was dressed. The nightgown was her signal that no sex was permitted because she was bleeding.

"Nightgown? No way. You're not bleeding now, and don't pretend you are." That already cut down his access far too much, and if she started lying about it, he might never get any when she was mad, and she was usually mad.

"What I'm not doing is having sex with an asshole who insults me. Move to your own side." Well, they could continue this argument in bed. He moved to give her loads of room. She got in about as far from him as she could get.

"You can't," he told her. She couldn't deny him. She couldn't punish him this way; it was fighting dirty.

"I can. What part of the word 'no' is too complicated for you to understand?" He reached over to her -- a surprisingly long distance. She slapped his hand as if he were an annoying mosquito. He managed to caress her, but she turned onto her front. Even when she was bleeding, she allowed him to hold her melons -- not tonight.

"Go away. Some of us did some work this evening. I need to sleep." He took the sheet away. Using his foot as well as his hand, he got it mostly off the foot of the bed. Then he got up on his side so he'd be able to use his right arm. He could barely see what he was doing, but enough light came through the window to see that she was still there in her nightgown and facing away from him.

He grabbed the hem of her nightgown and pushed it up to her buns. Now, she decided to roll over, but he thought the access to her back would be a good starting point. He got one hand on the top of her back, and he put more weight onto the hand on her buns. Soon, he was supporting much of his weight on those two hands. Enough weight remained on his left leg that no twitching of hers could unbalance him.

She kicked furiously, and impotently. That showed his good judgment in leaving her on her front. She could only kick back from her knees in this position. He timed a thrust of his right leg to avoid her kicks. That wedged his legs between her knees, and kept her from clamping her legs shut.

And, after pulling up her nightgown a little more until her buns were naked, he used that separation of her legs. He traced his way down the crack between her buns until his fingers reached her lower lips. A little rolling of these against each other provided enough lubrication to make further exploration comfortable for her.

She was still struggling as if this was totally objectionable to her, but her body was responding positively. He parted her lips with one finger and traced down to her nub. Carolyn felt different from this direction, but still sexy as hell. He could stroke her until she crossed over. And, thinking that, he began to stroke. Her kicking came back with new intensity, but no greater result.

"This is rape, you know." That sounded like a good idea. He wanted her, but he wanted to punish her, too.

"Yeah." He stroked her nub more slowly. Carolyn thought that he was in love with her body, not with her. That wasn't really true, but -- right now -- he was mad at her. He was still in love with her body, and he and her body were going to have a lot of pleasure tonight. Too bad he couldn't see her face, but letting her turn over would lead to all sorts of problems. For that matter, with the light off, he couldn't see her go over at all. He would certainly be able to feel it, though, and it felt like she was close.

She went over, trembling and shoving her hips into the bed. Well that was one. He suddenly remembered her saying that he'd never seen her go over six times. Well, tonight, why not?

As his finger kept stoking her nub, she went over again. They came more frequently after that, and her hips started rising from the bed instead of digging into it. He made his plans.

Right after the sixth one, he shoved her legs apart. He kept stroking her, though, and she went over another time before he was ready. When she relaxed after that, he knelt between her legs. He shoved them apart. He continued stroking, which required switching fingers when his posture changed. When she went over and her hips rose, he parted her lips.

"Nor really," he said as he got into position. That hadn't really been rape -- he thrust his dick deep into her juicy snatch -- this was. He got the last feeble clutches of her snatch around him as she sank down to the bed surface again. He moved his arms so he could grab her elbows -- no telling what she would try like this. He rested as much weight as he could on her buns.

But he hadn't come here to rest. He rose a bit on his knees and stroked in and out of her snatch. She was so juicy that his dick was practically swimming. The sensations of her around his dick were smoother than ever before. They didn't bring him any insistence, but they were incredibly arousing. He didn't have to worry about her this time, and he didn't. He just stroked in and out at the rate he found most pleasant.

When she went over again, she was still smooth but clasped more tightly. He sped up and drove harder into her. He felt wonderful, though he knew he'd feel awful in the morning. Well, if so, he'd better get all the pleasure he could now.

When she went over again, he finally joined her. She rose under him and clamped around him. He drove forward, pressing her down again, and poured himself into her depths. She was still clutching around him -- although weakly, when he relaxed. His weight came down on his elbows and on his belly pressed against her buns.

That had been something else, total release. When he finally recovered his breath, he rolled off.

"Oh, Carolyn, I love you."

"I love you too," was her surprising reply.

"You do? I thought you hated me." There followed a period of silence.

"Well," she finally said. Darling girl! He loved her, but he'd already said that. After he kissed the shoulder which was all of her he could reach, he curled on his side for the spoon. Much later, she rolled to her side and backed up to nestle with him.