Treat slumped into a chair.
"The hell with them all."
Derry gathered her magazines and left the room. Brian switched to the Act of Contrition. The fog cleared a bit and he heard the instrument panel plainly again. Treat's head lolled back a little as if he were resting, breathing widemouthed like a fighter between rounds. He was very pale, his hair a thin white. The Mad Mole.
And I detest all my sins, thought Brian, because of the loss of Heaven and the pain of Hell. But most of all
Derry scuffed back into the room. She was in a pink short nightgown and fuzzy slippers that had bunny faces on the toes and cottontails at the heel. She was trying hard to stick out what she had to stick. She looked like a sexy Easter duckling wiggling her tufted butt and breasts. She bounced over and plopped in her father's lap, never taking her eyes off Brian. It was like a toddler showing off a new lollipop, proud and possessive and more than a little taunting. Look what I've got and don't you wish you could get some? Treat kissed the top of her head.
"Night honey. Mr. McNeil is going to be out here on the couch so don't be too noisy in the morning. Gimme kiss."
She rolled her eyes and held her nose and gave him a peck on the cheek. Brian wanted to swat her.
"Night Daddy."
The girl hopped off her father's lap and tiptoed to Brian and kissed him. It was more like a meal than a kiss and he fought to keep his tongue rooted. She skipped away before he could react with much more than a gasp for air. Derry disappeared into her bedroom.
"The light of my life, that one," said Treat. "Worth her weight in gold."
He went on for a bit, running down like a tired phonograph, about the difficulty of judging superiority in the arms race, the relative merits of the Sentinel and Safeguard defense systems, the fallacy of deterrence. He tired and Brian drifted. Finally he pulled the couch out into a bed and showed Brian where the bathroom was.
"Have a safe night," he said, and retired to his room.
A loud fan clicked on with the bathroom light, a highpitched hummer. The toilet bowl looked funny. Brian sat and saw directions pasted on the wall across from him. Close lid, pull lever and waste material will be thermally disposed. The other writing was even stranger. It was on the toilet paper, roughly three letters per sheet in red Magic Marker. See you tonight, it said, Derry. The message and Brian's waste material went out in a thermal hiss.
The pullout bed was comfortable enough but sleep was out of the question. There was the instrument panel noise to contend with, thoughts of what Derry was up to and a new wave of cellular dissipation. Brian remembered from his few real high-school drunks what a tricky business lying down was, that the ceiling tended to revolve in one direction and his stomach in another. But the concepts of stomach and ceiling weren't so definite, the action now wasn't revolution or rotation but Brownian movement. His molecules scattered softly outward till they met dense lead-and-steel molecules that bounced them back in. Sound was included in the deal now, the bleeping and whirrings of the instruments were solid particles pinging in the air-mix with him. Welcome to the oneness of being, thought Brian, and rolled on his front to try and hold some of himself in.
This went on for quite a while. He had a sense of being the room and everything in it. Not a good feeling. It occurred to him that maybe his thermally disposed wastes were vapor now and had dispersed to remingle with him. He felt himself, the room, tilt very slightly. He smelled, no, collided with odor molecules, of grape bubble gum. Derry was sitting on the edge of the bed.
Twice in the same day. Seventeen years of drought and then twice in the same day.
This time when his hair was brushed he turned and opened his eyes. She was a little brat. She was probably underage. But he felt a pressure to respond, felt it like the holiest Commandment. Thou shalt not turn it down. He tried to collect himself, to think himself hard, and wondered why it hadn't already happened. Compared to Mary Beth Derry was sex itself and yet he wasn't tingling down there. He tried to think dirty thoughts. He had to keep the Commandment, he couldn't waste another one.
Derry stuck her gum on the couch and began to nibble at his neck, she slid her warm, chubby hand slowly down his chest, across his belly and stroked the underside of his balls and all the wandering molecules of his consciousness came charging back like the Seventh Cavalry to an Indian massacre. She was re-forming all his boundaries with her mouth and fingers, showing him his edges.
"Urn," she said, and "Nnnnhl" and all kinds of little skinsucking noises. Derry made love like she ate dinner, fast and loud. She knew what she was doing, sort of, and did it with almost frantic enthusiasm. Her nightie was off and she slid under Brian's spread blankets and emerged squirming on top of him. His eyes had adjusted some to the dark now and he saw how brown her nipples were pointing out from her single-scoop breasts, chocolate-kiss nipples swollen hard in his palms and lips. Her tongue darted over him and he smelled the saccharine grape wherever it had been. She locked her legs around his thigh like a vise and humped and squirmed till it was slick with her wetness. Then she was down flattonguing the head of him, slow, tasting licks. All the molecules galloped to where the action was and it felt hard as steel, dense as lead and she bit it at the middle, gentle with her teeth. She was up and spraddled and aiming it, holding it with two hands, rubbing the head against her greased lips making excited little-girl sounds and he wanted to ask her to keep it a little quiet but she plunged down around him hot and tight, tight as white on rice and she bounced, bounced like a kid testing her new summer-camp mattress for spring and the bed crunched and Brian clutched at her little buns, squeezing to keep her from flying off. She was doing it by the book and it was a cheap drugstore-paperback and it came to him that she was more excited over some red-underlined passage she was imagining than about him, it came to him that she was making an awful lot of unnecessary noise and Treat might hear. But all that was a little distant. What was immediate was that the molecules in his cock were getting awfully crowded, more and more of them, denser and denser and fast neutrons were beginning to act up and he was approaching his critical mass which was scary and exciting at once, Derry bouncing, bouncing, smacking damp against his belly and thighs and if it blew now he didn't think it would ever stop, just keep coming and coming till he and Derry were a cloud of charged zygotes drifting in the atmosphere and it was pulling on him now, making wet-munching sounds and Derry was making a high giggle and Treat was bellowing.
"Derry!" he was bellowing, "Stay still Derry, I'll come and help you!"
Help her what? Derry lurched off and was away from the bed, still giggling hysterically. Brian rolled out on the floor onto his hands and knees. He strained to see through the dark. He heard rustling from the kitchen area and then saw Treat, saw him coming crouched and wary with a big iron skillet in his hand.
"Derry! You get clear of him Derry. I'll fix him."
"It wasn't me, Daddy," she sniffled from the door to the bathroom, "honest. It wasn't me."
"You go to your room, Derry. I'll take care of this."
Brian tried to crawl silently but his thighs made sticky sounds as they brushed, coated with Derry's goo. Treat made a rush and swung but slipped in mid-stroke on a bunny slipper and went down on his side. Brian leapfrogged the bed and grabbed his pants and sneakers. Treat growled and scrambled back into the darkness to block the vault door.