Chapter 12

Paul’s turn:

Last night was crazy. I got a call from Barb to come to her house to talk with her grandparents. Apprehensive? You might imagine. I was having a serious relationship with their fourteen year old grand-daughter, a relationship that, of late, had a sexual component.

As in ‘I spent my life imagining and never had imaginations like this.’

I left there an hour or so later having been told that the grandparents were moving to a retirement community and that I was to provide a home for Barb. I didn’t get in my door before Barb’s piercing whistle stopped me.

I watched her walk up my steps and let her into the door. The door was barely closed and locked before she was in my arms.

“Gramma says I might want to talk with you alone.”

No, I’m NOT ripping her clothes off at this moment. We sat on the sofa, had a conversation, before she pushed me over onto my back and climbed atop me. Okay, after that, conversation was limited to sighs and coos and moans and “Oh, yeah...” and “Just like that”.

She went home before the appointed time, leaving me a useless pile of humanity. Happy, though. Both of us.

Happier, because it appears a chance is on the horizon that I will have Barb living with me full time. I know it’s at the cost of her grandparents’ declining health, but I have no control over that factor. I can sympathize, and I do, because I’ve watched it happening in just the few months that they’ve been neighbors. Releasing (I can’t use ‘sending’) Barb into my care opens a path to a new lifestyle for them.

And nobody knows Barb like I do. Since we’ve met we’ve talked about everything imaginable. Starting with my describing myself as a writer, then an engineer, and her self-description as a bent student in a world that didn’t fit her. I gave her room to be herself and quickly found that what she wanted to be was a person I found desirable on every level.

I went to sleep with her words in my head.

Woke up the next morning alone in my house. Solitude that I once enjoyed is now a drag on me. I want Barb with me in a way I’ve never wanted a woman. No, it wasn’t sex. It was like she became the spice that made my life alive, vibrant, intriguing.

I had breakfast, simple bowl of steel-cut oats from a big batch I’d prepared a day before and refrigerated. With a little honey and milk, it’s easy and healthy and holds me until noon. It’s late morning before the door opens and my little mate walks in.

That’s an immediate kiss. Since we became a couple we’ve developed a language of kisses between the two of us.

This morning’s first kiss is “Hello, I missed you. What do we do first?”

We considered the temperature outside, the angle of the sun and how much exposure we’d get if we were down there. I regularly move the downstairs table I write on to take advantage of my desire for shadow or sunlight. Today sunlight’s good. Just check the angle so your computer screen’s usable.

We got downstairs. She took her laptop out of the shoulder bag in which she carried it, and placed it on the table opposite mine. Her fingers brushed mine and she smiled.

“I’m excited. It’s gonna happen.” Exuberantly she came around the table, wrapped her arms around me from behind and kissed my ear, pausing for a nibble that made my whole body shake.

“Barb!”

“I knowwww,” she whined. “I got carried away.”

“Barb, we need to start being really careful about casual expressions of affection. When I was in college, we got infrequent lectures about “PDA” stuff, which means “Public Displays of Affection.””

“OK, but it’s nobody else’s business, so what’s the problem?”

I sighed. “We’ve had this conversation, baby. The problem is that you could be looking at me thru the bars of a jail cell, if we’re not careful. You need to think about that, if you want us to live here together. People are serious about older guys and young teen girls, around here.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Put my hair up in a bun, wear granny dresses and carry a Bible?”

“Nope. But I AM thinking about making you look like a young college student. Maybe a science major of some sort. Put you in stuff like loose khaki shorts and a few college T-shirts, that kind of thing. NOT sexy, is my point. I probably need to do something similar myself.”

“So that’s all? Just clothes?”

“Barb, sometimes perception is reality, and when people look at us, I want to look “not guilty.” My old boss used to say ‘an ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.’ We need to be the very picture of propriety.”

“Does that mean I can’t even hold your hand?”

“Yep, at least in public, usually. And I can’t call you Barbakitten in public.”

“I’m only Barbakitten to you and Grampa. To everyone else I’m Barb-wire. Ready to shred flesh, you know.”

“Worse than that, you’re MY Barbakitty. Not touching you in public view is tough for me, too, but we need...”

“I guess I can slightly alter my wardrobe to look a bit more mature,” she said. “But I do like wearing things that make you look at me – you know what I mean.”

“Rest assured. I will ALWAYS have pictures of you in my mind that have nothing to do with what you’re actually wearing.”

And that’s a conversation about that one aspect of our relationship. Barb started out by getting into my head, about learning, growing, writing, story-telling, sharing the events of daily life.

We discovered real intimacy that one afternoon where a sudden cluster of thunderstorms rolled up from the Gulf, the rain driving us from the screened downstairs patio to the house upstairs, each of us with a book in hand.

She waited until I positioned myself in my recliner, then joined me, snuggling back, book open. Iprotested at first.

“Hugs, Paul. That’s all this is. Hugs. Sometimes I need more hugs than I get from Gramma and Grampa.”

No, she didn’t wiggle herself down into my crotch and my wariness about sexual contact with a young teen was still strong, so I wasn’t erect under her. Not much anyway, and when she turned a page, I understood what she was getting from this arrangement.

The intimacy level, by my estimation, went through the roof. Any couple can do sex. Arousal at its basest level has little to do with any psychic connection. But for Barb, beautiful, whimsical Barb, to feel comfortable enough to want to be that close to me, that required more, much more. I recognized it, and I think she did, too.

“So Princess Donabella’s trying to find how she can live in a modern world,” Barb narrated, picking up the threads of the story she was building. “Put myself in her shoes. Whole new world. Magically she can speak the language. That’s my crutch because I can’t imagine her sliding from the eleventh century Hibernia to modern United States and not being able to communicate.”

“That would be a step,” I said. “In my stories there’s always a lingua franca, a more or less universal language in use, along with translators of some high-tech origin.”

“What’s a lenga franca?” she queried. I know she can’t know everything I know, but she does know a lot and she’s constantly asking questions about new things.

“A sort of universal language to facilitate communication between groups with little common language between them. In Africa, Swahili’s an example. It’s not the language of a tribe, it’s the mish-mash of several.”

“Oh, wow!”

“It’s interesting. There’s pidgin English around the southwest Pacific, New Guinea and all that. And I forget the language that was in common use around the Mediterranean. And ‘Spanglish’ here. But for a story, your way will work.”

Her head bobbed back down. “Pidgin ... C’mon, Google...” Home-schooled, indeed!

Lunchtime. Build a sandwich. “Call your Gramma and see if they can stand another tuna casserole,” I told her.

“Grampa LOVES your tuna casserole,” Barb returned. “And I know how to kill time while it’s in the oven.”

“Oh boy,” I laughed.

She grinned. “I know you’re trying to be sane about this, Paul, but you gotta understand that sometimes I just WANT us exploding together. Critical mass. Fusion. Fission. Something that rewrites the laws of physics.”

Another writing day, Mozart playing softly. Sunny, Barb is absorbed in her home-school stuff. I had NOT planned on being a tutor. Now I find a dozen times a day where she poses questions and we discuss answers.

Barb. I really TRY to understand how her mind works, because, “Paul, this glass thingy. Look how all the colors come out of it. What’s that all about?”

“Barb, it’s a prism. Kinda shabby -- has a corner chipped off, and it’s just glass. I like it because it reminds me of the fundamentals.”

“Fundamental WHAT? Pretty, though.”

“Look at the colors more closely. See how they band into different colors?”

“Yeah. That ROY G. BIV, now that I remember. And the eighth. Octarine, according to Pratchett. I don’t see it here, though. So what’s your point?

“Noticing that they band into colors made some old physicists start thinking about the energy levels of photons. One of ‘em was a German guy named Max Planck. He figured out a way to calculate the energy levels of the photons by color, and then he figured out the math to tie ‘em all together.