Chapter 1

Life was boring, the same old same old until the new neighbors moved in a few years back. Even then for the first couple of years nothing changed. The only reason people talked and gossiped and got hot about nothing is because the neighbors were from Pakistan.

Brown, -ish that is, with black hair, odd angular faces, and an accented English that was distinctly not American nor that of the few British actors that popped up in the movies.

My father thought them strange and grumbled about the fall of America. Pakistan didn’t mean anything to me. I had my own life to live in high school, my own interests and cares. If you’d shown me a map I’d have been clueless about what chunk of Asia it was in. I even thought Pakistan was in Africa until Suman hit my shoulder and told me it was by India which was in Asia somewhere.

Suman. She’s at the heart of this story. She was a grade behind me, just finishing up her junior year as I graduated from high school. We mostly ignored each other when her family first arrived, my father not being real happy with a bunch of Muslims moving in and her father not being keen on his eldest daughter being seen with a white working-class guy.

Turned out my father was an idiot. Getting to know Suman’s family over her first years here they turned out to be Hindu, which happened to be one of the reasons they even wound up in the US. I was never clear on the subject, religion or politics or geography, so most of the details flew by me.

Our mothers got to know each other, even sharing morning tea when my mother was off work. And due to our being in the same school and Suman looking hot and sexy with every passing month she and I got to be friends. It’s possible I would have dated Suman, even against her father’s wishes, but I was in a different grade and had different friends. Yet since we lived next to each other it wasn’t unusual for us to wind up walking home from school together or running into each other over the weekends. A few times Suman and her younger sister, Prisha, even met up at school for lunch. Later on, like late into my senior year, I was even surrounded by a trio of Pakistani girls that included a cousin, Reeta, but mostly I kept my eye on Suman.

That last year of high school was a wonderful time only because it ended and I was freed from the drudgery of the American educational system. Not that becoming an adult gave me freedom and happiness. My father was old school, telling me to get a job and live a life, but that was a lot harder to do than say.

Towards graduation I wound up with some part-time jobs, neither giving me anything in the way of benefits, but I was doing better than a lot of my friends. Then a single low-paying manual job, still with no immediate benefits but with a future. Soon to be out of school and working and living on my own. Not living the dream but making my own way as a young American male. It could have been worse.

Maybe the biggest strain on my life and my budget was living expenses. Would have been easy if I’d stayed at home but my mother was hoping to turn my bedroom into a hobby room and my dad was growling about how I needed to be more independent. That’s why the month I turned eighteen, two months before graduation from high school, I found myself being nicely if insistently moved out of my room and into the dark basement apartment of a neighbor down the street.

It was cheap and near home but not quite the bachelor pad I’d hoped to be living my life in. Didn’t matter. Work and food and sleep took over all my time so its not like I was able to troll for girls at school and enjoy wild weekend parties. Life as an adult was obviously just as bad as my parents showed it to be and a month before graduation I was longing for the easy life of being a kid again.

There was only one true joy in my life and that was girls. Sadly they were also my one great frustration. Ask any guy in his late teens. He’ll agree. So wonderful to see and talk with girls and kiss them and maybe, when life was wonderful, they would lust for me as much as I desired them.

I had a part-time girlfriend for all of six months the summer and fall of my senior year and it was pretty wonderful. We enjoyed all the joys of lust fueled sex.

A part-time girlfriend? Complicated. I actually had two girls to play with. I stole the one girl, Amy, from a good friend who didn’t mind sharing as long as he got some part of her every few days. He in turn took over many of my manly duties for the girl he borrowed from me on a weekly basis. Everybody at school thought we were normal couples but we double-dated a lot and did a lot of tag-team sports whenever possible. Good sex, the kind of stuff kids love to gossip about, but it wasn’t the kind of activity that built long-term and lasting relationships.

The only reason Amy and I broke up was because she was focused on college and I didn’t even know where the major colleges in our state were. I was solid blue-collar and she was an aspiring white-collar professional. It hurt to have her let me go and lose all the rights and privileges I had to her very fine body but I got where she was coming from. My first girlfriend, the other half of my sex life, wound up in the arms of her much older next-door neighbor. The wife walked out, my part-time high-school love interest moved in with the old guy, and I never saw her again. Wild.

So, I prepared for graduation and worked and lived out my life as a free adult in a dark dungeon of an apartment, but at least I was free. I could come and go as I wished, had a place to park my junker of a car, and my phone and internet costs were covered by my parents and by my upstairs landlords. It could have been worse.

But the point of this story was the neighborly joy that walked into my life. Late spring, a hot and sunny Saturday. Still in school and graduation was a month away but I didn’t care. The weekend was perfect for ignoring both work and meaningless school exams by washing my car.

That’s when Suman came walking down the street. The beautiful and most luscious Suman. She was still a couple months away from being seventeen but had the sexiest body of any girl in the neighborhood. As she approached I could see her fine outstanding chest. It was only barely covered by a light top with a deep cut in the middle that showed a good portion of her womanly peaks. She’d complained that her father sometimes had fits over her style of dress and sometimes made her cover everything but her face in what she called ‘traditional garb.’ Yet on this day she had dressed for and by herself and all the boys in the neighborhood were able to rejoice.

It was wonderful to watch her walk toward me, her breasts moving in time with her step, the girl pretending the rhythm of her body didn’t have an effect on every pair of watching eyes. That minimal strip of cloth only accentuated her chest and the top edge of her skirt rode low on her hips, allowing all to see the silver piercing of her navel. And that same skirt was short enough for me to enjoy the movement of her thighs, their upper reaches showing a much lighter brown than her beautiful face.

Suman did have a wonderful smile, her dark almond eyes sparkling with life and just a bit of humor, the girl’s words often including some element of skepticism if not sarcasm. It was an odd form of humor, an attempt to show control, and rather than feeling put down or put off by her rejoinders I always invited her to say and argue more. This often turned our conversations of even the most common things into sparring matches, the two of us quietly laughing at the other’s implied insults. Though we only occasionally met and talked about more than empty pleasantries, I considered ours a unique and enjoyable relationship.

But just then, the full-figured girl walking toward me in the growing heat of a spring morning, Suman looked less like a next-door acquaintance and more like a goddess of sensual desire. I hadn’t really talked with her for perhaps a month but she called out and acted like we were best friends. We talked a bit, about the coming end of school and my work, but then she invited herself into my underground hovel.

“So, David,” she said, enunciating my name with the lilt of a foreign English speaker who happened to have better English skills than most of my friends, “You live here? I know you moved but didn’t know where. Show me. It seems like a nice house.”

“Not my house,” I admitted, walking her around the side of the large two-story dwelling occupied only by my landlord and his wife. “I just live in the basement. Nice enough but everything’s crammed into a few small areas. And dark. No full-sized windows but the rent is cheap.”

Suman was polite, saying nice things about the cramped space. I was glad I’d cleaned up the small kitchen area and had done laundry the day before, but it only took two minutes of inspection before we found ourselves back in the small front room where I’d crammed a donated couch and work desk.

My thoughts were all over the place but I was spending most of my energy trying to fight off my attraction to Suman. Beautiful, sexy, smelling of some exotic perfume or body wash and, most importantly, alone with me. So when she provided the opening to do more than engage in small talk, I fell into the abyss and took her with me.