"And play around and try stuff and things like that?"
"Sure. Sure we will."
"Mmm! Okay, sis." And he squeezed me hard.
CHAPTER THREE
We stayed on the lounge quite awhile with Mark's pecker still in me. It was soft and had shrunk a lot, so some of his cum oozed out around it and got both of us gooey and sticky, and the smell of cock got pretty heavy in the night heat, but everything felt great to me. We couldn't stay that way forever, though; Gunner kept whining and nudging at us and his wet nose was awfully cold when he poked it against my side or reared up and stuck it between the backs of my legs.
So we got up and giggled a lot and took a shower together. It was the first time either of us had done that. Mark got another hard-on, what with both of us being soapy and slick and him rubbing against my tits and feeling around. But I wasn't about to let him climb onto me again that night. I mean, a girl doesn't have any right to spoil a kid, even if she is the one who's supporting him. I turned off the hot water when he wasn't looking and the cold stream shriveled him up in a hurry. Even after that, though, we toweled each other dry. I'm afraid I was just about as horny as he was, and I had the most delicious feeling about being able to do just what we wanted to. I made sure the door to the hallway was locked and we went back to the sun porch and left our clothes off and talked.
We didn't turn on the lights; the moon was shining in so bright we could almost make out colors in its glare. And a couple of times we heard people going past in the alley and got up and stood right in the window, naked and gleaming in the silvery light, with me hanging onto Mark's cock and him getting a handful of tit. Nobody happened to look up, and I guess that was pretty lucky. If they'd seen us and said anything to Ma Conner, our ass would have been in a sling.
Somehow we got around to talking a little about what had happened at supper. Mark was sorry for Will, although I felt the kid deserved whatever Ma said.
"Aw, sis!" Mark argued. "How would you like somebody all the time telling you how much you owed her? And knowing your mother didn't even care enough about you to care what happened to you? Wouldn't make you real nice, I bet."
"Well…" I hadn't thought of Will that way. He was just a nasty, irritating kid, as far as I was concerned. But when Mark put it that way I did have to admit Will had an awful lot of provocation for being a snot. "Well, maybe…"
"Who likes him, sis? Ain't one person here that does! What's he got going for him?"
That got me where I was weakest. Mark and I had found out all about being lonely and miserable. But at least we knew our mom and dad had loved us and done everything for us they could while they were alive. Will hadn't even had a father; everybody in Emporia knew he was a bastard. And then to lose his mother the way he did – to have her take off to be a whore and not even see that anybody was going to take care of him…
Well, that was bound to make him feel terrible. It was bound to make him bitter and defensive and contrary. The worst part of it was, like Mark said, nobody anywhere liked the little shit! The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I'd been just as mean to Will as I could be. I'd gone out of my way to make things miserable for him. And there had been a few times when he'd actually tried to be nice to me, like a dog you kick around still comes nosing around with his tail between his legs trying to make you like him.
Maybe I was still thinking about that the next morning. I know I wasn't being very careful. I let Duane Fowler trap me in the upper hallway before I even realized he was there. I guess I was worried about two things. I didn't want to have it on my conscience I'd helped drive a kid out of society. But neither did I like the way Mark seemed to be trying to pattern himself after Will. I mean, I was beginning to see signs of Will's rebelliousness and contempt for what he called the "establishment" cropping up in Mark. And I sure wasn't going to stand still for that!
So there I was. I ran right into Duane… bumped into him and fell back and looked up to see him looming over me and grinning down at me.
He gave me a real leer and ran his stare right down over me as if I were naked. And he said, "Hey, baby! We've got hours and hours before we've got to open up the alleys. What do you say you come on into my apartment for little cozy loving up?"
I backed a little further away and looked around to see if anybody was around. I knew Mark was still asleep in his room and it looked like Eric might have gone out already. Anyhow, there wasn't anybody in sight upstairs. So I sort of bristled and tried to bluff my way out of it.
"Get lost, man! Maybe you've got plenty of time to waste! Not me! And I don't want any of your loving up!"
"Aw, don't be a sorehead. And don't play so hard to get! Hell, I know you don't mind putting out."
"You don't either! You know those stories aren't true!"
"Yeah? How would I know? Where there's smoke there's fire, I always heard."
"Well, I'm not hot for you, Duane Fowler. You just leave me be! I wouldn't sleep with you if you were the only man in Emporia!"
He turned ugly. He stuck out his jaw at me and sort of bent toward me and I thought he might hit me. He didn't; he just snarled. "Shit! One of these days you're going to piss me off, kid! What's to keep me from grabbing you right now and yanking you in there? Bet you wouldn't even holler!"
"Better see I can't get my fingernails to your eyes, you bastard!"
He kind of lowered his voice. "One of these days, twat…!" And his eyes looked like a snake's. "One of these days I'm going to tie you up and take some of the sass out of you! Time I get through, you'll beg me to fuck you every time you see me!"
"Fat chance!" I flared at him, a great big chunk of ice in my belly.
He made a sudden lunge as if he meant to grab me. I whirled with a choked yell and made a dash for my own door. I flung it open and dived through. And as I yanked it shut I realized he hadn't taken one step after me. He was still standing there, feet widely planted and hands on hips, laughing up a storm!
Just the same, I didn't go back into the hall until I'd made sure he wasn't there. By the time I did go downstairs, Mark was up and went with me. And everybody was already there. Eric was taking the day off, letting the assistant superintendent handle the dock, and he had on a real snappy-looking pair of brown slacks and a yellow, pull-over sportshirt. His muscles bulged under it and I felt like a giant hand was squeezing my chest.
I spoke to him without thinking. "Oh, gee, you look nice!"
"Hmm." He didn't sound the least bit interested in how I thought he looked.
"Eric…"
"Hm?" He still wasn't interested.
"Eric… those things Nancy was hinting last night… there isn't a bit of truth in them."
He just lifted his eyebrows… didn't even say anything. And Nancy edged in our direction. She hadn't heard what I'd said; I'd kept my voice low. But maybe it looked to her like there was something developing between Eric and me. She made her hips sway and twisted her shoulders a little so her boobs would look bigger than they were and fluttered her eyelashes. And when she lowered her head and made a shy-type smile that wouldn't have fooled anybody, Eric actually smiled back at her.
It made me sick to my stomach, and I went on into the dining room for breakfast. Will was there. When I sat down, he went into one of those "good-dog" acts, trying to make up. Well, maybe "good-dog" didn't fit this time. He was pretty blunt and outspoken.
"No call for that stuck-up brat to go around making dirty digs at people like she did," he remarked. He didn't raise his head… simply spoke around a mouthful of cereal and shoveled in another bite.
"What?"
"That stupid Nancy. She's a squid."
"What's a squid?"
He glanced up, then, an expression of lofty pity there to irritate me. "What Nancy is," he said.
My conversation with Mark came back to me. I had to try to be nicer to Will. "Thank you for caring," I told him softly. "It makes it a lot easier to ignore her."
He choked on the bite he was swallowing. "Huh? Thank you?"
"Well, nobody else cared enough to think about how nasty she was being!"
"I…" He looked confused and maybe a little upset, as if it screwed everything up for somebody to do something besides yell at him. "Well… nobody stops and thinks how rough it was for you and Mark to have both your ma and pa killed at once. I mean, they ain't lookin' at what it's like when you gotta support your kid brother. The establishment don't make no allowances for that kind of cases. You're on your own like everybody else. And if they c'n get their hooks into you, screw you!"
I didn't like all that talk about the establishment. It was like saying something bad about the flag, almost. "I don't know that I understand that part about the establishment. I mean, what have I got to do with that?" Maybe if I led him on a little I could show him where he was going wrong.
"When you got time someday, I'll explain." He was starting to sound superior again, like that type usually does when you pin them down.
"Why not this morning?" I asked. "I've got some time after breakfast."
"Aww… There would just be somebody interrupting and making a big noise and not knowing what they were talking about."
"No! Come visit me! We can sit on the sun porch and watch the people down below and talk without anybody bothering us!" He wasn't going to get away with any old excuse! If I could force him to talk sense just once he'd see what silly slogans he was mouthing.
He acted as if I'd trapped him. "Naw. Mark wouldn't understand me trying to make you see. And then he'd go around telling everybody all about it and laughing."
"He's going fishing with a couple of the kids down the street. He won't be there."
"Hmph." Will was as contemptuous of fishing for channel cats in the river as he was of the establishment. "Well… okay! I'll come up! Only you don't really want to know."
"You'll see." I knew he was preparing himself – making excuses ahead of time for the fact he didn't have anything to back up the meaningless phrases he'd learned.
But he did come up. When he rapped on the door and I opened it, I glanced up the hall to see if anybody was there to notice and breathed a sigh of relief nobody was. As nasty-minded as people were getting to be, no telling what they'd say if they saw him coming into my apartment. I let him in and closed the door fast. And just to be sure, after I motioned him through to the sun porch, I locked the door so nobody would come in without knocking.
For just a second or two, I stood there with my hand on the lock, a strange tingle going over me. There was something appealing about Will in spite of his disagreeable personality. He acted as if under all his bluster he was as naive and inexperienced as Mark. He was only a little older, and if everybody reacted to him the way we did at Ma's, there wouldn't have been much of a way for him to have any experiences. I let myself wonder for an instant if his foreskin would be as tight and unmanageable as Mark's had been if a girl were to try it, then shook off the notion and scolded myself. For Christ's sake get a hold of yourself! I thought. Just because he's a male and you've got him alone with you in your apartment doesn't mean you've got to teach him how to fuck! This isn't the Bijou! Don't be a slut!
So I went out and sat with Will and watched people going by below and listened to him. He didn't have any better idea what he was talking about than I'd expected. All he knew was the slogans and catch phrases.
But he did keep glancing at my boobies out of the comer of his eye, and for the first time I didn't feel dirty about his looking at me. It kept coming back to me that it was lack of love that made him such a mean, nasty kid. And I kept drifting back to the idea one person could wipe out all of that aloneness and hurt.