Chapter 4: But We Don’t

March 14th, 1995, 5:07 PM EST Pennsylvania Station Harrisburg, PA

The silence was soft and sweet, the kind of good silence that can exist between two people when they feel that there is no longer anything to communicate in order to reach understanding. They loved each other. They needed to sit and ponder that. No more doubts, nothing to wonder about anymore. Now they had to wonder how this was going to work, because they were going to make it work.

George drifted with the lights off holding Jill in his arms, her body against his. The last of the battery in the car shut off the reading light some time ago. He didn’t know how long. It was too long, though; the engine change should not take close to long enough to drain the back-up lighting supply. Her hair tickled his face, as he was sure his beard scratched hers. He could feel the warm moisture from her joyous tears drying on his face as her head was buried in the crook of his neck. It was ... paradisiacal.

He softly babbled words of endearment into her ear as she seemed to almost purr against him. Looking past her golden locks, he could see her baby blue tank top, its exact shade unclear in the dark room, barely covering the waistband of her jeans which, he remembered, were a faded blue. Her small and starkly white Reebok sneakers hung off the seat. He gently rubbed her belly under the shirt, and she sighed.

What really startled George was not the love; he had gotten that. It was the trust. She trusted him to not push too far, something he heretofore had not been inclined to do with regards to girls in his younger teenaged years. He couldn’t possibly be exuding a sense of kindness or respect. They were not a major part of his makeup. She was right, he couldn’t hurt her, or force her. But he didn’t get how she could know that he felt that way specially towards her.

The nature of everything had been a bit mentally exhausting. He couldn’t remember if anything was written on her t-shirt. He couldn’t even remember where he was. How he got here. Anything. There was just the here and now, the warm body of the beautiful girl resting against him, purring with contentment, her breath softly warming his neck in a slow rhythmic pant. Each sensation was playing as if it was dialed to 11, but not in a bad way. It was all here, all part of the wonderful pageant of being here, with her.

She settled her warm, supple body downwards a bit, and he could feel the contact with her feminine attributes. While it felt absolutely wonderful, for once in his life, he didn’t have the sudden urge to call down to the engine room, “Damn the torpedoes, FULL SPEED AHEAD!” No, this time ... nothing existed outside of their embrace. And this ... this was different- enjoyable on its own. Her being just with him, holding him, holding her, it was enough to satisfy him in this moment.

For this was not the first girl he had ever known. He had known many girls. He had known some of those girls carnally. Girls seemed to find him handsome, his rugged, absolute manliness and powerful dominance of everything around him a magnet as if girls were pure iron. They didn’t even seem to mind being cast aside for the next conquest; it was as if he himself was their conquest.

To him? Well, sex was a pleasurable activity. He enjoyed doing it. What difference did it make who he did it with? None, none whatsoever. It was an improvement over self satisfaction, and he grabbed plenty of it. It was offered up on the plate of life, and he dined on it. It was really that simple, that basic. He didn’t even remember all of their names.

Truth be told, however, he didn’t particularly like girls. They were emotional, they were possessive, and they were controlling. They seemed to over think every situation in the world, and often seemed to believe that he was a mind reader, capable of reading what they wanted of him without telling him. And if he wasn’t, he should be, the insensitive bastard. Pfui. The relationship part seemed like the excess baggage that he wanted to avoid carrying around with him.

But this? This was different. She didn’t seem fixated on his broad, powerful shoulders. She never stared at the bulge in his pants. She never seemed fixated on the scars, the beat up face, or his imposing presence. When talking to him, she stared into the one thing nobody ever seemed to. Hie eyes, which would express respect and pleasure on the rare occasion when somebody rated such things from him. And from the moment she silently smirked at the snub her aunt and uncle gave her, he liked her. She had chutzpah, audacity, and temerity. She would be a hard girl to hold down, to turn in to an ornament.

His head was light. He couldn’t get his mind into gear completely. He couldn’t even seem to draw a full breath. Nothing seemed to matter or exist but the warm body in his arms that seemed to contain nothing but kindness and love. Love for him. Not for what he looked like, but for what he actually was. It was mind boggling that what he was warranted love from a girl so basically intelligent and good.

This wasn’t lust, either. Sure, she was a girl, and this girl’s crotch was pressed against him. Yes, he was hard. That was physical reality. But it wasn’t the first thing he was thinking about. He was thinking about her being here, with him, alive and real. Nor did he love her because she was a beautiful girl. Something just told him in his heart that, alone of all the people he had met, perhaps of all the people in the world, this girl, this world wisened woman, understood him. The truth was, to a large extent, that gave her one up on himself.

But how could I feel this way? he asked himself, Christ, I met her at lunch but four hours ago. How could I know these things? How could I believe this?

He tried in vain to summon doubts that would allow this to not work. But he couldn’t. He knew in his heart, and it was the only thing in his heart, and most of what was in his brain, that he loved her. Not only that he loved her. That she loved him. He stopped trying to understand it. It was a pointless exercise to understand the human heart, and much greater and more intelligent men then he had failed miserably to do so after dedicating their entire life to it. There was no way he could figure it out this afternoon.

He knew better than that, anyway. He was a man of literature, and as such, he knew of all that was written trying to understand love. And it lead him to the truth, a conclusion so simple, it found the existence of that literature laughable. Understanding love was laughable- because it was beyond man’s capacity for understanding. Nor was there a great need to understand it, if you knew it when you saw it.

But some real questions popped into his head. Chief among them was how, in the name of God, was he going to make this work. She was 14 years old. He had no idea where her aunt and uncle were from- certainly not L.A. He had no idea where her other uncle lived, let alone if he would allow such a relationship- and from such long distance? That was, as the German’s say, sehr lächerlich.

He remembered an old quote- that love will find the way. But he had to wonder, how would this love find its way? He was given a slight wake-up call as the train jolted again, and the lights came back on.

Jill was also drifting in the wonderful embrace she found herself in. She let her hair tickle the George’s nose, to get him back for tickling her with his beard. She felt absolutely fantastic. This, she thought, was how life should be. This was the dream for the future she had always had, the dream she thought would be denied to her in perpetuity, because Lance would manage to trap her, or worse.

Hell, she hadn’t felt this safe, this warm, or this comfortable since the last time her mother had held her in her arms over four years ago. That memory was one of the things that kept her going past that night. That night, that dark, stormy, and terrible night four years ago! It had brought her world crashing down in a fiery mess. She could remember it as if it was yesterday.

That night the police officer rang her doorbell, when she came racing down the stairs. She thought it was her parents. She wanted to leap into their arms. She hated being away from them. They had been really close, perhaps unusually so, since she had trouble making friends with most people. As they told her baby sitter of the drunk driver. They thought she was out of ear shot. The baby sitter and her bo- fuck, she didn’t want to think about this.

She’d been tossed around among her various relatives. Nobody wanted her, and it hurt- at least until Lance got her, and that was out of the frying pan and into the fucking fire! Nobody had cared. They were too busy splitting up the riches doled out by her parents’ woefully inadequate wills. She was sure there had to be some illegality to all of it, but what it amounted to was beyond her. People just don’t tend to carefully set up plans for how to handle their children if something was to happen to them- even fairly wealthy people like her parents.

She had spent the past two years living with these rotten, selfish people. Her Aunt Krista and her Uncle Justin. Those bastards. They went out and bought a residential unit in the tony Plaza Hotel and a Jaguar and jewels and other crap. Expensive clothes and toys. Trinkets of no great importance, they lavished upon themselves. But upon her? She was doing well if she could convince them to take her to Goodwill or the Salvation Army store.

Not that she cared about that. She wasn’t a materialistic person, anyway. No, it was the symbolic difference that bothered her. The symbolism it gave. Her parents’ death was a joyous occasion for Aunt Krista. They could move up in the world. The only problem was she’d be burdened with Jill for two years at a time, albeit with extra compensation. She found it hard to believe that Krista, Lance, and her mother all came from the same loins.

Jill doubted Krista had shed a single tear over her sister’s death. It was just free money, with one small string of burden attached. Fuck them, she thought. If she could run away from her so-called family and never see them again, that would be a coup. Life would be improved, by a lot, and that was before George factored into the equation.