The boys still sat where she had left them, each glowering into the fog thinking long thoughts. It was cruel, she supposed, to interrupt but she had no intention of being stripped naked out here in the fog by a couple of would-be studs who didn't even start taking their own clothes off first. What, she wondered, would have happened if she had let them get away with what they had been starting?
She caught the lanyard and rang the fog bell again. Somewhere in the distance. she heard the deep booooo of a fog horn.
"What's that?" little John asked.
Ted explained about foghorns and lighthouses.
Albert still glowered at the fog.
Fuck him! she thought. He wants to fuck me but he isn't gentleman enough even to be polite.
Let him spend the next five years growing hair on his palms and maybe he'll appreciate the next woman who gives him a free feel. If he wanted to give her the silent treatment she was perfectly used to living alone without even a seal or seagull to talk to.
"How long we gonna be here?" Albert asked unexpectedly.
Ted shrugged. She sat across from the boys on the opposite side of the cockpit, just out of reach of their roping hands. She wondered if either of them would have enough gall to come over and sit beside her. Probably each of the boys was consumed with projects to get the other out of the way. She almost laughed.
The combined air of charged sexuality and the veneer of innocent I-don't-know-what's-going-on reminded her of that halcyon day on the casting couch in Mr. Hammel's office. She had been relaxing as best she could under the stimulus of that tongue between her legs, those busy hands caressing tits and ass when suddenly Mr. Hammel had writhed out of his clothes and before she quite realized it he was on the couch too, kneeling between her thighs.
Now how, she wondered, did he manage that without me knowing it? Suddenly, despite her twelve-year-old virginal innocence she had known what was going to happen next. Mr. Hammel was going to slip his thing into her. He was going to fuck her. And that would be the end of her career as a dancer.
Ted didn't want to dance all that bad but her mother did and Ted had long ago accepted that she was to be sold into a life of bondage to satisfy a whim her mother had been too busy fucking to gratify. Like any obedient child, she had accepted her mother's will as divinely ordained. Now Mr. Hammel was going to spoil it all.
Ted didn't know what her mother would say if Ted were to lose her virginity at this age. But she knew, perfectly well what would happen if she were no longer able to dance. Firmly, she closed her thighs.
Mr. Hammel was in between and she couldn't close them all the way. Before he could react she performed a back somersault and, legs tight together, rolled off the couch and onto the floor. Red faced and pantsless, Mr. Hammel was thoroughly ridiculous. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"I'm a virgin," Ted said firmly. "I'm going to be a prima ballerina in your next production. You promised. If I let you do what you're trying to do I won't be able to dance as well."
"You'll be good enough," Mr. Hammel reassured her. "Besides, you'll still be a virgin when I'm through."
Ted, like any child, had been deceived by broken promises before. She remembered her mother in a bargaining mood. "I want to talk to Momma first," she said.
For a moment it looked like Mr. Hammel would have a heart attack. Then, wiser than Ted in the ways of show business mommas, he finally picked up the phone and instructed his secretary to get Momma on the interoffice telephone. While Ted listened he said, "The audition's going very well. You've signed and received your copy of the contract, haven't you?"
There were scratchy noises on the other end.
"Yes, yes, that's fine. The audition my take another hour in case, you'd like to do some shopping," Mr. Hammel hinted. "By the way, would you like to give little Teddie the good news?" He handed Ted the phone.
From the outer office Momma said, "Ted, just be nice to Mr. Hammel now. Everything's all arranged so do whatever he tells you. I'll be back in about an hour."
And thus did Ted cease being a little girl and enter the grownup world of lying, deceit, and all the usual sins of omission and commission which give rise to the relationship between such words as adult and adultery. "All right, Mr. Hammel," she said, and climbed back onto the couch. She was still clad only in black patent leather shoes, white ankle socks, and a pink hair ribbon. Mr. Hammel wore shoes, socks, undershirt, shirt, vest, tie, stickpin-everything the well-dressed impresario of twenty-seven years ago wore-except his trousers. He climbed back up between her legs.
At twelve Ted had never heard of a stoic. But stoical was her attitude as the red-faced man knelt between her thighs. Her dancing days were over. Maybe lacking would be more fun. Either way, she was being a good girl, doing what Momma told her to do.
"You'll still be a virgin when we're through," Mr. Hammel whispered.
The only other person Ted had heard of who had accomplished this feat was God. With his pants off Mr. Hammel somehow really didn't fit her preconception of God. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"I'm not going to put it-in you there."
Ted didn't know whether to be relieved, or annoyed. Alter all the trouble she had gone to shedding her attitudes about virginity… besides, if he wasn't going to fuck her, what was he doing between her legs?
She discovered what he was doing when abruptly Mr. Hammel grasped her knees. He lifted and hooked them over the rough tweed shoulders of his jacket. Ted's nude twelve-year-old body hung suspended from her knees and the nape of her neck. She felt the blood rush to her head and to the nipples of her tiny just budding tits. Then his large hands grasped her waist and took most of the weight off the back of her neck. Then he arched his neck and put his tongue back into the gaping hairless lips between her legs.
It felt so nice Ted didn't care if she hung upside down from her knees all day. His warm strong hands around her waist squeezed and she felt warm waves of passion surge from waist and cunt to meet in a tiny explosion in mid belly. She could feel her tender breast buds throb with hot rushing blood, aching for the feel of those hands, that mouth.
She wondered if it would be possible for Mr. Hammel to grow two mouths so he could kiss her tits and pussy at the same time. Then she wondered about the more practical solution. What would it be like to lie down naked on this couch and let one man kiss her hairless, virginal cunt while the other took care of the rest of her burning body?
She stored away the idea for future reference and somehow it managed to remain in storage for twenty-seven years until now she was aboard the yacht, fully dressed, sitting across from these two ghetto boys. There was a sudden warming of her insides at the thought. She had been concentrating so hard on getting rid of one of the boys…
What would it be like to try it with two at once? What, she wondered, could they really do? Her mind reeled at the possibilities. Or were they impossibilities. She guessed they had to be possible. Nobody could write all those things in the magazines-none of the moralists could get so totally bent out of shape about group sex unless somewhere somebody was doing it. But who? Where? Did thirteen and fourteen-year-olds go for it?
The two boys both sat across from her in the cockpit. Despite the parka Ted felt the chill. She suspected that the boys each wrapped in a blanket, would feel the chill too if they could stop burning for a moment. Moments ago before her precipitate flight each had been close to explosion, each with his handful of flesh and hopeful of more and more handsful. Now they sat bereft and alone, not even able to sympathize with each other because neither was willing to admit that the other might have been doing the same thing he was.