Chapter 1

He awakened just before his climax and by the time he was aware enough to know what was going on, it was too late. He blew his load into her hot mouth and she enthusiastically sucked it all down, not loosing a drop.

Her name was Anna; she was sixteen and a familiar sight around the neighborhood. She delivered the morning paper and collected for it once a week. They had talked a few times and it had turned into a regular thing. She would show up in the evening once or twice a week, sit with him on the wide front porch and they would talk while he had a beer or two. He found that they both considered TV a waste of time and her home life sucked so much that she got out whenever she could.

Paul felt badly for the girl, she was a nice kid, smart as a whip and had managed to rise above her squalid home life. She kept herself fresh and clean and her clothes were always clean as well. She displayed considerable ingenuity with her wardrobe, she always managed to look good despite getting her clothes from the Salvation Army and church Thrift stores.

They were friendly, but certainly not friendly enough for this, although she seemed to think differently. He angrily sat her down and questioned her, asking her why on Earth she had done such a foolish thing, and she told him her story.

Her mother, she said, was an over-weight semi-pro whore, drank heavily and survived on ‘tips’ from her legions of boyfriends, plus state aid and regular child support checks from her ex-husband.

Some of mamma’s customers had attempted to molest her, showing up in her room in the small hours of the morning after mamma had passed out. The first one ran out of nerve after Anna screamed at him and the second one left very hastily after Anna waved a butcher’s knife at him. After that incident, she stole some money from her mother and one of her johns when they were both too drunk to remember anything.

One day after that, when her mother was out, she paid a sympathetic school janitor to install a deadbolt lock on her bedroom door. After that, whenever her mother had a ‘friend’ over, Anna had escaped into her room and locked the door. She had been too slow one time and a guy had forced his way into her room. She’d had a bad thirty seconds or so before she had the opportunity to knee him in the balls and make her escape into the kitchen, slamming the door behind herself. A few seconds later, he limped through the door and stopped in the empty kitchen. Anna stepped out from behind the door and felled him with a single, full armed swing with a cast iron skillet to the head. He went down, she said, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

She set the pan back on the stove and finding him still alive, called the cops and an ambulance. That had earned Anna three months in a foster home while her mother served time for soliciting. Anna told Paul that the only thing that had kept her safe in the foster home was the story of what she had done to the guy that tried to molest her. It had been erroneously reported that she had beaten the guy half to death and that months after the attack, he was still in the hospital with brain damage. It wasn’t true, of course, but she played it up for all it was worth and it worked.

Paul felt terrible about her situation and he felt even worse when he told her that there was nothing he could do about it. That’s when she dropped her bombshell. She had gone to a lawyer, had taken all the steps necessary and was ready to have herself declared emancipated. The lawyer did the work for her Pro Bono and the paperwork was ready to go. They were waiting until she found a place to live. She would have an income, the child support checks would come to her after the papers were filed, and keep coming until she was twenty-one. And she had her paper route job which paid a little bit as well.

She knew from their conversations that his house, which he had just inherited from his grandmother the year before, had a small two-room apartment above the garage. It had been packed with an odd assortment of things and he had been slowly emptying it out, sorting through the stuff and selling most of it, and turning a pretty good buck on it, too.

She wanted that apartment. She wanted it badly enough that she was willing to fuck him to get him to give it to her.

“So you blew me, hoping I’d say yes, right?” Paul asked.

She nodded, and got up. “I’m sorry I bothered you.” she said quietly and headed for the door. “It won’t happen again.”

“Wait!” Paul said quickly. She stopped but did not turn to face him. “You can have the apartment.” She did not move.

“What’ll I have to do to get it?” she asked, her body stiffening.

“Pay rent,” he said dryly, “in cash. Utilities are included, since they are not metered independently. That doesn’t include phone or cable, those will be your responsibility. The place is furnished, but not very nicely. If you want to fix it up, I’ll pay you for materials and your labor. I’ll show you how to do something if you don’t know how.”

She turned to face him, her eyes bright with tears. “How much?”

“How much is the support check?” he shot back, trying to gauge how much she could afford.

“That’s none of your business.” she replied. “How much?”

He laughed. “Tough cookie, aren’t you?” He regarded her thoughtfully. “Two-fifty a month.” Her eyes closed and her shoulders slumped. “You can reduce that by, let’s say, up to seventy-five bucks a month if you’re willing to clean my house twice a month, at fifteen bucks an hour.”

Her head came up and she looked at him, her face expressionless. “Why’s the rent so cheap? You can get twice that.”

“I didn’t plan to rent it at all.” he said wryly. “My plan was to spruce this place up, renovate it and unload it. I figure it gonna take me five years. I don’t want to be a landlord, it’s a real pain in the ass.” He smiled at her. “I figure that you’re desperate enough and smart enough to not cause me any trouble. Do you want it or not?”

“Considering what I just did here,” she said slowly, and blushing fiercely, “Cleaning your pipes wouldn’t happen to be part of that cleaning job, would it?”

He laughed. “I’ll worry about my pipes, kiddo, and you worry about yours. Do you want it or not?”

She stuck out her hand. “I’ll take it, starting next month, if that’s ok with you. Thank you.” They shook on the deal.

That had been six months ago, and he had no reason to regret the deal. She paid her rent on time and had actually built up a one-month cushion, just in case her support check didn’t show up on time.

She did a beautiful job cleaning his house, her movements quick and economical and the place looked great, better than he had seen it look in years.

She had also painted her apartment, quickly learning how to do it properly and he had helped her only once, painting her ceilings for her so she wouldn’t have to move a ladder every five minutes to do it herself. She had repaid his labor with hers, spending an equal amount of time cleaning for him without pay.

He had been barbecuing a steak one night when she while she cleaned his house and had asked her if she’d like to stay and eat with him after she finished work, and she had. It had been a pleasant evening for them both, and a week later she had invited him to dinner when he got home from work, serving it on the picnic table in the back yard.

It had been one hell of a good meal and he had been extravagant with his praise, knowing that she had cooked it on a beat up two burner electric range and a severely limited budget.

Their once a week meals together had become a habit, something they both looked forward to. They discovered they liked a lot of the same things, especially reading, and he loaned her books from his grand-parent’s library, now his, on a regular basis. They had a comfortable friendship, one they both enjoyed.

That all changed one stormy Friday night.

They had spent the evening enjoying their once a week meal together and afterward, sitting on the front porch, talking about the latest book she had read and watching a storm move in to the area.

Ten o’clock rolled around and he was ready for bed, but she skillfully kept the conversation going and did not leave for her apartment until almost eleven.

Thunder was grumbling overhead as he undressed and the floodgates opened just as he finished brushing his teeth. He had always loved a good thunderstorm and this one was a real frog strangler, with rain so heavy you could hardly see through it and thunder and lightning crashing overhead.

He padded downstairs and out onto the deep front porch clad in only his pajamas, marveling at Mother Nature’s show, at the sheer ferocity of the storm. Lightning flared across the sky and the lights of the neighborhood died, the night fading to pitch black except for a spot on the next block where a power transformer burned brightly on a utility pole.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see the rain again, coming down harder than ever. He moved back from the front of the porch, standing against the front wall of the house as the wind picked up and began to blow the rain on to the porch.