In itself the problem would have been bad enough, but living with Penny had made it almost unbearable. Time after time Victoria had had sex waved in her face as her roommate brought home droves of young men. On several occasions Victoria had to leave the room she shared with her dark-haired classmate, knowing it was that or sit by a knuckle-chewing frustration while Penny proceeded to make love to her young man of the moment, not even seeming to care that there was someone else watching.

Victoria's answer to this unwanted vicarious sexual stimulation had been to take refuge more and more often in lonely and secret masturbation, and this was beginning to bother her now. The young blonde was not a particularly guilt-ridden person, and for her, masturbation had begun as a fairly innocent exploration of her developing young body but then slowly developed into a needed and pleasureful release of the tensions that normally accumulate in healthy girls. Even so, she could not help but pick up some of the feelings of guilt that society hung on her forbidden act, and so Victoria had compromised in the past by very seldom relieving her frustration with her own fingers, only in times of the greatest sexual stress, or once in a while as a kind of reward for virtuous activity.

And that was the core of her worry today. Living with Penny made it almost impossible to think of anything but sex and Victoria had been resorting more and more frequently to her emotional pressure-release until her genitals were practically aching from the constant invasion of her thrusting fingers. Right or wrong, something told the confused young girl that this was an undesirable situation and she just didn't know what to do about it. On the one hand she could allow things to continue as they were, but her continual nervousness was already beginning to affect her schoolwork. Or she could take the plunge and let some eager young man seduce her. Even as this thought entered Victoria's young mind it was accompanied by a bolt of unreasoning fear, and she doubted that she would be able to go through with it. How did Penny and other girls like her do it? The young blonde wondered, and asked herself for the thousandth time if maybe there was something wrong with her that kept her from reacting naturally with boys.