“I can show you how,” she whispered. “It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”
“I don’t think I can,” he said hopelessly.
“We’ll try,” she told him. “Here, I’ll help you with your clothes.”
Normally, she discouraged a man from undressing completely. It meant more time spent afterward, waiting for him to dress. But this, she knew, was a special case. This was the pop-eyed boy’s first time, and she felt that it was her job to make it as good for him as she possibly could. She didn’t stop to think that she was feeling this way solely because the boy was the first person she’d met in the last two weeks who was even less experienced than she.
She helped him undress, even to his socks, and they both looked at his body. “You see,” he said mournfully. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” she said. “Come on to bed, and we’ll take care of that.”
Obediently, he crawled onto the bed with her, and they lay side by side. She touched him, holding him with one soft hand, and smiled at him. “I’ll make you ready,” she promised him. “Don’t you worry.”
“I want to,” he said. “I really do, you’re beautiful and I wish I could. But I just don’t think I can.”
“Yes, you can. Now, when you go downstairs, if Madge — that’s the heavy woman out front — if she asks you what you had, you tell her it was just a straight trick. That’s ten dollars. You’ve got ten dollars, haven’t you?”
He nodded vigorously.
“All right. You tell her it was just a straight trick.” She smiled again, and squeezed him. “But it’s going to be a lot more than that,” she told him. Dee had told her how to get a man ready, all the different ways, and she did them all. At first, he lay awkwardly on his back, his brow furrowed with doubt and alarm, but gradually he relaxed to the soothing strokes of her voice and hands and lips. And all at once he was ready, and finished. It had happened like that, so fast, and he looked mournful all over again. But she whispered to him, fondled him, assured him would be all right, and soon he was ready again, and this time it lasted. She didn’t have to fake passion this time. Then he was finished again, completely finished this time, and they went through the mechanical aftermaths without losing any of the glow. He paid her the ten dollars, and she took him back downstairs, where she squeezed his hand and said, “You come back again, now, d’you hear?”
“I will,” he said. “I sure will.”
Three
When she awoke she was not alone and for this she was very grateful. The monotonous walls of the hotel room were painted a dull gray that was no color at all and the made her feel trapped sometimes. A few pictures here and there might liven up the walls, and several times she had told herself to tear a picture or two from a magazine and get some scotch tape at Mr. Harris’s drugstore on the corner, but she never remembered and the walls remained as depressing as ever. When she woke up they seemed to hem her in, and when she went to sleep they appeared to be watching her.
But now, now that she was no longer alone upon awakening, the walls were not nearly so hard to bear. Now that there was another warm body beside her own warm body, another human being sharing her bed, now everything was much more pleasant and it was a genuine joy to open her eyes and face the day.
She yawned a luxurious yawn with all her muscles participating. She stretched and yawned again. She closed her eyes and snuggled her face against the pillow that was warm with the cozy warmth of her own body heat.
When she opened her eyes again Richie was still in bed and still had not moved. She put her head on his chest and listened to his heart beating, listened to the rhythm of his breathing and smiled a slow and secret smile to herself. She put out a hand and touched his chest right over his heart, touched him once and just for a moment, and then removed her hand. He didn’t move, didn’t wake up, but he made a small sound through closed lips and he seemed to be smiling in his sleep.
He’s just a little boy, she thought contentedly, and she put her head back on her warm pillow and closed her eyes again and thought about him, her little boy. She was glad that he was the way he was, that he was like a little boy and all afraid of everything and never quite sure what to do. He needed to be taken care of, needed her to hold him and cuddle him and watch him sleep, and for this she was thankful.
She remembered that time, the first time with him, and she remembered how he had been waiting for her when she left the house that night after work was finished. It was 4:30 in the morning by the time she got out of the house and the sun was getting ready to think about rising. The sky was light. The first birds were already out after the first worms and the ground was moist with dew.
She left the house and headed toward Schwerner Boulevard. She had walked maybe thirty yards when she heard a voice, a voice calling “Honey!” It was a few seconds before she realized that the voice was calling her because Honey was only her name during working hours, and that only with customers. Madge and Dee and Joan called her Honour. Terri, who seemed to think her full name was humorous, called her Honour Mercy, sometimes Honour Mercy Bane. She would drawl it out southern-fashion until even Honour Mercy, who thought her name a perfectly sensible one, would find herself laughing.
But now a voice was calling “Honey!” and the Honey it referred to was quite obviously herself. She turned around and got scared for a minute because he was just a foot or two away from her, his eyes very intense, his mouth half-open and scared.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
He seemed frightened by something, but after she took his arm he wasn’t frightened any more. He told her that he had just come to town, that he didn’t know where to go and that he didn’t have any place to stay. She nodded thoughtfully, liking him and feeling sorry for him, and the two of them began walking toward Schwerner Boulevard. She was taking him to her hotel, although she did not know it at the time, and would have been surprised if someone had suggested it to her.
On the way he talked, talked about himself, and from the tone of his voice she got the feeling that he was telling her things he had never told anybody before, telling them to her without knowing why. Her customers often talked to her, sometimes before but more often afterward, but now it was not as if it was a customer talking to her. When the customers spoke she would nod her head and say “Uh-huh” without really hearing a word they spoke, but now she listened to everything he said. It was more like talking with one of the girls in the house but it wasn’t quite like that either.
He told her that he was supposed to be with the Air Force at Scott Air Force Base near St. Louis. He told her that he was AWOL, that he had left without permission and would be punished if they caught him. He did not explain why he had left the base, not that night, although he did tell her several days later, but she knew then that he had done something wrong and that was why he had left.
She was glad to hear his confession. When he told her, she felt a kinship with him — they both had done something wrong and had been forced to run away. Neither of them could go back where they had come from. She was very glad, and when he told her she understood the similarity between them and she hugged his arm tighter.
At the entrance to the Casterbridge Hotel they stood awkwardly for a moment and he shifted from one foot to the other. Then she told him that he could stay with her for the night — or morning, more accurately — because it was no hour to go looking for a hotel room and because the police might arrest him if they found him out on the streets at that hour. He accepted gratefully and they went into the hotel and up the stairs and down the corridor to her little room.