For the long Saturday afternoon that she was going to spend with Russell Clayton, Jenny Craig put on a long black cotton dress that fit her snugly all the way down, with a thin black scarf around her head. The dress reached almost to her black shoes, and the only reason that she really had room to walk was that it was slit up the side and overlapped, so that she was still covered to about mid-calf almost all the time, even though the real opening was above the bottom of her panties.
Russell Clayton had been having either good luck or bad with women lately, depending on how you looked at it. Good, maybe, since every woman he had gone out with for some time, before Jenny Craig, had gone to bed with him on the first date. Bad, maybe -- well, it could be that they had not seemed very good in bed because they lacked imagination and could not think of anything else to do but have sex. Also, it is said that the brain is the most important sexual organ, and Russell had not had much opportunity to fantasize about those women and picture what he wanted to do with them before he was doing it.
Russell was something of a romantic and liked to think of himself as seducing women, while the ones he had encountered lately had regarded sex as something you did in response to a man buying you dinner and so forth; a straight commercial transaction. And they seemed to have little to talk about afterwards, so that these women were attractive enough, but not interesting.
Jenny Craig seemed to be of a different kind. They actually held conversations, and when he tried to kiss her at her door, she said to him: "I have a policy of not kissing a man on the first date, although this evening has been so nice that I am sorely tempted to break my rule. But I won't."
Russell did not know if what she said to him was true, but there was no question that hearing it did things for his ego and made him want to see her again -- as she obviously did him.
On the second date, a week later, she left him flatly at her door again... Or not exactly flat, since after a serious kiss and a period of holding her in his arms, while he did not get into her apartment or her, he was left round and hard.
If the way she dealt with him at the end of the first date made him want to see her again, the way she acted at the end of the second made him want to do a lot more than that with her. Not that he wouldn't have wanted to anyway, but the combination of action and resistance fired up his imagination.
This long afternoon began with a walk through the park between her apartment and the subway station with his arm around her. She seemed to accept that readily, even this early in the day. The movie followed, a sort of romantic western which appealed to men and women about equally and deserved to make tons of money if anybody knew it was there. They held hands and even kissed a lot during and after the love scenes. (The sex was just suggested.)
The dinner was a slow and very happy one in a Chinese restaurant. Then came the subway ride back, and this time they stopped in the park and sat, talking as the day faded into twilight. Russell bought a small bag of popcorn from a vendor and shared it with Jenny.
They got up after a while, and watched the birds splashing and squabbling in the pond. When Jenny put her hands on the railing, Russell put his right hand on hers and his left on her rear end.
He had done this a number of times earlier today, when walking with her, including in this same park the first time they went through. As his hand moved a bit, it occurred to him that there was something a little different now. The waistline of her panty elastic was not really visible in this dress, but his hand had felt it before. She was pantyless!
When Jenny had sat in the restaurant with Russell, she thought to herself that she was not yet sure if she wanted to have Russell stay all night with her, but it was a definite possibility and he was a definite temptation. She knew him well enough by now to know that if she went to bed with him, it was not going to be a one-night stand where she would never hear from him again. There was potential for a relationship between them that could go on for some time -- perhaps a lifetime. But if she were going to do it, she would want to do it, and to have him get at her, with little delay once the decision was made.
So when she went into the ladies' room in the restaurant, she took off her panties and put them into the reticule she carried. Not wearing them would not matter during the fairly brief time between the restaurant and her apartment where Russell would leave her -- or not leave, as the case might be.