Oh, you would, little baby, thought Vince. You sure as hell would. And you sure as hell will.
“I think I’d like him to—”
“Stop!” Bobbi, her face contorted with rage, suddenly lunged forward and cracked Adele ringingly across the face, open-handed. “Stop that!” she screamed. “Stop tormenting me like that!”
“Don’t you slap me!” Adele was suddenly enraged, too, and came up from the grass swinging.
Vince stared at them in blank-faced astonishment. Their conversation, their actions — none of it made any sense. And now they were rolling around on the ground down there, punching and scratching and biting each other, and he couldn’t figure out for the life of him just what the hell they were fighting about
The two of them, fighting grimly and silently now, kept rolling around on the grass, slugging and clawing one another, until finally the inevitable happened, and they both tumbled off the bank and into the shallow stream.
They came up gurgling and thrashing, and all at once they weren’t fighting any more. They looked at one another, solemnly, and both climbed back out of the stream; and sat down on the bank once more.
They sat in silence for a while, Vince watching and scratching his head, until at last Adele said, softly, “I’m sorry I teased you, Bobbi. I shouldn’t be mean like that.”
“And I’m sorry I slapped you,” Bobbi said. “But when you talk that way, I just get so jealous I can’t stand it. And when you keep going off with that Vince all the time—”
“I won’t do that anymore,” said Adele. “I’m really and truly sorry, Bobbi.”
Vince blinked. What was this? A minute ago, she’d been talking about making it with him. Now she was saying she wasn’t even going to go for rides with him anymore. He wondered what the hell was going on down there, and he also wondered just who in hell Bobbi thought she was, and where she came off, queering his deal that way.
Bobbi got to her feet, a round blob in the middle of the clearing. “My clothes are soaked,” she said.
“Mine, too.” Adele stood up beside her, and started undoing her shirt. “We better take them off and spread them out on the grass, so they’ll dry.”
“What if somebody sees us?” And Bobbi looked up the slope, straight at where Vince was hiding. Even though he knew it was impossible for her to see him, he winced and ducked lower into the grass.
“Nobody ever comes up here,” Adele said offhandedly, and she stripped off her shirt. She was wearing a bra beneath it, which was a waste of good money. Those bee-bites of hers didn’t need any support at all. She spread the shirt on the grass, then removed the bra, and her breasts barely cast a shadow.
Bobbi, still a little hesitant, also stripped off her wet clothes. Vince looked at them both, and he thought they really should have been cut closer to the middle of the deck. Where Adele was thin as a rail, with breasts smaller than the White Rock girl, and hips skinnier than a basketball player’s; Bobbi was busting out all over. She had breasts that could have been used for sandbags, and a butt that was a sandbag. Nothing else in the world could be that wide and round and saggy.
They were both nude before it occurred to him that his status had just changed from eavesdropper, which wasn’t really very bad, to peeping tom, which was very bad. He ought to get away from there before they found him and got the wrong idea.
But he was afraid to move, afraid he might make some small sound that they would hear. And now, with their clothes off, they’d be more alert for the sounds of other people. So he stayed where he was, and waited for a chance to slip away.
Besides, it was pleasant to have a preview of Adele’s body. The legs, as he’d already known, were very good, with strong and supple thighs and good calves. And her stomach was flat, her waist delicate and tiny. The bee-bite breasts weren’t much, but it might be fun to play with them a bit. Play delicately, of course, in relation to their size. Just with fingers, not with the whole hand.
Now stripped, Adele lay on her back, one arm across her eyes to keep out the sun, one knee raised. Vince nodded approvingly. That’s the position, little baby, he thought. You just keep practicing that.
And then Bobbi’s hand reached out and squeezed Adele’s breast.
Vince blinked. What the hell was that all about?
He’d expected Adele to sit up like a shot, hollering, but she didn’t do anything of the kind. Instead, she smiled and murmured, and reached up to press Bobbi’s hand tighter against her breast.
“I do love you so,” Bobbi said, and her voice was so soft that Vince could barely make out the words. “You know how much I love you. You shouldn’t tease me the way you do.”
“I know, honey,” Adele said soothingly. She smiled up at Bobbi contritely and said, “I won’t do that any more.”
Bobbi leaned down and kissed Adele on the lips, and Adele’s arms twined around the other girl, and soon they were lying side by side on the grass, stroking each other’s body and murmuring.
After the first movement by Bobbi, Adele became the aggressor of the two. Bobbi lay flat on her back, and Adele leaned over her, stroking her breasts and stomach and thighs, kissing her, leaning down to nip at her breasts, kissing all over Bobbi’s body.
When they really got into it, and Vince knew they wouldn’t be paying any attention to outside sounds for a while, he crept slowly back down the slope, and headed down the path for the road and his car. He kept shaking his head in disgusted amazement, and trying to figure out what the hell kind of world it was he was living in anyway.
Well, he’d found his virgin. There was no getting around that, he’d found a guaranteed virgin. Guaranteed for life.
And that, he told himself, was definitely that. First two phonies, and now a dyke. Talk about queering the deal! Okay, the virgin-hunt was off. He was cured.
Back at the road, he got into the car and drove toward home. The virgin-hunt was off, and he was soured on the lake. He didn’t want to be at any lake with Rhonda and Adele — the relationship kid and the dyke. He didn’t know for sure where he did want to be, but he did know for sure he didn’t want to be at the lake.
His father was reading the paper, inevitably, on the screened-in porch of the cabin. Vince went into his bedroom, which had a window looking out onto the porch, and grabbed his suitcase. As he stuffed clothes into it, he said through the window to his father, “You aren’t going to be needing the car for about a week, are you?”
His father looked up from the paper, startled. “What?” His suitcase packed, Vince said,
“I’d like to take off in the car for about a week. You don’t need it, do you?”
“Well — well, no. But—”
“Okay if I take it for a week? Don’t worry, I won’t crack it up or anything.”
“I know that,” his father said. “You’re a good driver, Vince. But—”
“Then it’s okay, huh?”
“Well, I suppose so, but—”
“Fine.” He grabbed the suitcase and left the bedroom.
His father followed, the paper trailing from his hand. “Where are you going?”
Vince dumped the suitcase into the backseat of the car, slid behind the wheel, said, “See you in a week,” and took off.
Four
The trouble with just pointing the car and heading down the road was that you might just happen to wind up in Brighton. And it wasn’t easy to imagine a worse place than Brighton. Even the cruddy cabin by the cruddy lake, rustically rotten as it was, would have been better. Except, of course, for charmers like Rhonda and Adele.
The combination of Relationship Rhonda and Dykey Adele made it necessary to head for greener pastures. But Brighton wasn’t exactly greener pastures. It was more on the order of a desert.