Free The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

toward the bedroom, adding, `But you leave Jake's bathrobe alone.'
    The rape was then consummated with a minimum of violence on my part, in fact with no great amount of imagination, passion or pleasure. The pleasure was primarily Arlene's. I went through the appropriate motions of mouthing her breasts, squeezing her buttocks, caressing her labials, mounting her in the usual fashion and, after a longer time bucking and plunging than customary (I felt through the whole act like a puppet trained to demonstrate normal sexual intercourse to a group of slow teenagers), finished. She writhed and humped a few too many seconds longer and sighed. After a while she looked up at me.
    `Why did you do it, Luke?'
    `I had to, Arlene, I was driven to it.'
    `Jake won't like it.'
    `Ah. . . Jake?'
    `I tell him everything. It gives him valuable material, he says.'
    `But . . . this . . . have you been . . . raped before?'
    'No. Not since getting married. Jake's the only one and he never rapes me.'
    `Are you sure you have to tell him?'
    `Oh yes. He'd want to know.' `But won't he be tremendously upset?'
    'Jake? No. He'll find it interesting. He finds everything interesting. If we'd committed sodomy that would be even more interesting.'
    'Arlene, stop being bitter.'
    `I'm not bitter. Jake's a scientist.'
    `Well, maybe you're right but-'
    `Of course, there was that once...'
    `What once?'
    `That a colleague of his at Bellevue caressed one of my breasts with his elbow at a party and Jake split open his skull with a bottle of . . . bottle of . . . was it Cognac?'
    `Split his skull?'
    `Brandy. And another time when a man kissed me under mistletoe, Jake, you remember, you were there, told the guy `I'm remembering - so look, Arlene, don't be silly, don't tell Jake about tonight.'
    She considered this.
    `But if I don't tell him, it will imply I've done something wrong.'
    `No. I've done something wrong, Arlene. And I don't want to lose Jake's friendship and trust just because I've raped you.'
    `I understand.'
    `He'd be hurt.'
    `Yes he would. He wouldn't be objective. If he'd been drinking.'
    `Yes he would.'
    `I won't tell him.'
    We exchanged a few more words and that was that. About forty minutes after arriving, I left. Oh, there was one other incident. As I was leaving and Arlene and I were tonguing each other affectionately at the door to her apartment, she in a flimsy nightgown with one heavy breast plunging out and cupped in my hand, and I more or less dressed as when I entered, the sound of a key in the door suddenly split through our sensuality, we leapt apart, the apartment door opened and there stood Jacob Ecstein.
    For what seemed like sixteen and a half minutes (possibly five or six seconds) he gave me that scrutinizing look through his thick glasses and then said loudly `Luke, baby, you're just the guy I want to see. My anal optometrist? He's cured. I did it. I'm famous.'

Chapter Nine
    Back upstairs in my living room I stared dreamily at the exposed one on the die. I scratched my balls and shook my head in dazed awe. Rape had been possible for years, decades even, but was realized only when I stopped looking at whether it were possible, or prudent, or even desirable, but without premeditation did it, feeling myself a puppet to a force outside me, a creature of the gods - the die - rather than a responsible agent. The cause was chance or fate, not me. The probability of that die being a one was only one in six. The chance of the die's being there under the card, maybe one in a million. My rape was obviously dictated by fate. Not guilty.
    Of course I could simply have broken my verbal promise of following the dictates of the die. True? True. But a promise! A solemn promise to obey the die! My word of honor! Can we expect a professional-man, a member of PANY, to break his word because the die, with the odds heavily against it, determined rape? No, obviously not. I am clearly not guilty. I felt like spitting neatly into some conveniently located