The Mullwest sisters lived just down the street from Gerald in a grand brick house with white trim and half an acre of yard with a little hill in the back and lush and impenetrable bushes fronted by lilacs and forsythia down each side. To the kids in the neighborhood, their lives and the family history were mostly lore, but the neighborhood assumed that Mr. Mullwest was a high-powered tycoon who had bought the house with pocket change, and that between him and Mrs. Mullwest they had only managed to have the two girls, twins named Alice and Abigail, who were weeks past being 15 years of age.

Mrs. Mullwest was odder than Mr. Mullwest, in a gossipy way. While Mr. Mullwest was thought to be constantly away for work or very rarely seen puttering in the yard, people simply did not see Mrs. Mullwest anywhere in the neighborhood. One early warm summer morning, however, while Gerald was doing his 6:00 am paper delivery rounds, he spied what he fearfully recognized as a body lying on their tree lawn. It turned out to be Mrs. Mullwest, sleeping off a night’s over indulgence in the dewy grass, adding unexpected oil to the neighborhood tittle-tattle.

As a result, the Mullwest twins were hardly ever under parental guidance, and their playfully imaginative lives showed it. They were almost two years older than Gerald, and attended a parochial school that he had never set eyes on, so he did not run into them during the day on school days. But living nearby meant that he knew them quite well, a pair of funny girls who looked a lot alike, both with auburn hair, a skein of freckles, and horse-like grins. They seemed to have grown up clad in indistinguishable school uniforms with white tops and plaid skirts. In fact, they shared rambunctious, playful personalities. They were, however, turning out to be quite feminine. In fact, they were woefully deep into puberty, almost inadvertently developing voluptuous frames, and this combined with their maturing personalities to say something like: you can’t catch me, but you can still try anyway.

Gerald and the twins had grown up together, enjoying the life of tomboys in the manicured landscapes of their neighborhood. There were no other families with boys in the neighborhood, and the girls admitted Gerald into their games for the very base reason that, for as long as they could remember, he willingly did almost everything they asked. Gerald was the more self-conscious of them, often acting out their wild games as a means of gaining their acceptance, while the girls were incessant planners and schemers.

Another playmate of theirs was Emily Carsconi, of Italian descent, who had very long, thick black hair. Her eyebrows were straight, dark, full charcoal, highlighting irresistible, languid eyes. She was a year or so older than Gerald, lived across the street from the twins, and was already distractingly and almost artificially beautiful to look at. And she knew it.

As a boy, Gerald was attracted to her without realizing it, as almost any self-respecting male would be who gave her the slightest amount of attention. Her dark beauty could hold the average male gaze like a magnet, but she found that that gaze faltered slightly when she returned it, which she had learned to do, piercingly, with a child’s unwitting incredulity, causing the beholder to look away in recognition and take stock of his emotions as if an indecent and unbearably rare event had just taken place between them.

Emily had grown accustomed to such attention, for it happened frequently. The constancy of the admiring gaze made Emily realize that it was going to happen no matter what. With experience she realized that some men seemed utterly uncertain of how to deal with her, and wore their attraction to her openly, even eagerly. For them she had come to understand that they held no clear remedy for this gift of their admiration. They could not help themselves, and accordingly she grew accustomed to exercising the power to subdue through no greater act than meaningfully returning their looks.

Despite this awareness, Emily was not smug or self-conscious, and was only at the formative stages of understanding what was happening when she shut down men’s gazes with her own. She was a youth and was, importantly, childlike. In the summer she liked to wear pink and white striped polo shirts and ruggedly tight denim shorts, and was a lot of fun to play with. And when the Mullwest twins mischievously announced one humid afternoon that they were forming a club, which they did before Emily and Gerald on the front porch of Emily’s house, they told Emily that they were hoping she would want to be a member. She knew a lot about cards, they said with coy naughtiness, implying that cards were a metaphor for something both more base and more adult. Knowing anything at all about cards seemed to them like reason enough to invite Emily into the club.

“A card club,” said Emily acceptingly, rocking in the porch swing, her thick, black hair swishing as though glued to her face and then flailing in the breeze behind her. “That sounds like fun. I know all the usual games.” She glided back and forth in slow undulations, purposefully playing in the breeze, acutely tuned into the underlying messages coming from the twins.

Gerald sat on the short sandstone-topped side wall of the porch, and because it seemed obvious to him that he was not clearly invited into the conversation, he was kicking a pillar with his buff colored tennis shoes, listening, suspecting something odd was going on based on the tone of the conversation and how it seemed designed to keep him at a distance.

“This isn’t only a card club,” Alice said informatively.

Emily stopped rocking. “No?” She asked.

“Oh, no, it’s a girls club, mostly,” said Abigail, with a joyful idiocy in her voice, purposefully encompassing the three girls and giving Gerald the message that they were up to something that might include him, but definitely not yet.

Gerald was used to this treatment. He’d felt it before from the Mullwest girls, and he’d learned not to let it bother him very much. Yet, based on the blithe tone of their talk, he had the vague feeling that they were talking about something important, more important than usual. He could not put his finger on it, but there was an odd feeling to it, as if it meant something sacrosanct, tenable to women but not initially to boys, and he suspected that the girls-only bond they were keeping meant even a peripheral admittance to it might come with a price for the male sex. His introverted nature bade him deal with these thoughts quietly in his head.

“Boys are allowed, but they have to follow all the rules, right?” Mocked Alice facetiously.

“It’s all in the cards,” answered Abigail giddily. They looked at each other and simultaneously flitted their eyes up to the heavens.

“Yeah. It’s a card club for sure,” Alice said instructively. Then she asked Emily, “Do you have a pack of cards?” It was clearly meant as a way forward, a way to get started on whatever the next part of this adventure would turn out to be.

Emily lifted her feet and let her rocking come to a still while she pondered the question.

“We made up a game,” Alice went on. “You draw a card and based on what you draw you have to go to a certain base. Like number cards under ten and you go to first base.” Alice then looked quizzically at Gerald to see if this baseball reference had any meaning to him. He was staring slack-jawed at them, but his eyes narrowed keenly and his mind focused and buzzed with attention.

Emily stood up thoughtfully, pulling back her hair and looking at nothing in the middle distance, realizing powerfully that there might be very interesting consequences to her success at finding a deck of cards. If she understood things at all properly, the game meant experimenting with adult themes, and because the Mullwest twins were more grown up, these themes might be really adult. Besides, the Mullwest girls were always coming up with their own weird ways of doing things.

“Boys have to follow all the rules,” said Abigail meaningfully, “because it’s a girls club, but sometimes girls don’t.”

Emily wanted to know if Gerald understood what they were talking about. She skipped over and stood looking at him, scrutinizing him with her large, black, candid eyes, purposefully inspecting him to see what was going on in his face. She locked eyes with him and he rather abruptly seemed to surrender his gaze to hers. He looked down between them, then returned her gaze with conciliation written all over his face, his eyes looking daubed with an unspoken pleading, and, even though it was not her intention, she felt again the satisfaction that comes from the look of a male publicly revealing the effect she had on him, the plaintive nature of his gaze seeming to confess a private need to please her.

“You know this card game is a girls club,” she said instinctively to his face, then with a jerk of her head she beckoned the twins over.

“Boys can play the game, like I said” said Alice, walking over to Gerald. Then Abigail sauntered over and suddenly there were three girls all fencing him off from the rest of the porch. “It’ll be fun,” she announced conclusively.

Gerald’s mind was tilting all over. To him, what hung in the air most, and which he could not see beyond, was at least the possibility of some kind of sex with three girls. He had almost no understanding of sex, and indeed no experience of it, but he believed they were going to include him in the game they were taking about, and it hardly mattered to him what was actually meant by sex. The idea of joining in a game of titillation with the older Mullwest girls seemed fun, and the idea of sexually suggestive behavior with Emily held a magnificent drama of its own.

“Let me go look for a pack of cards,” said Emily joyfully. Pivoting on one foot like a ballerina, hair radiating, she turned away from the group and made her way into the house. A moment later she returned with an unopened deck of cards still in brand new sheer wrapping, holding it tremulously like you might handle a wet frog. When Alice and Abigail saw it, they gave each other down-lows followed by hi-fives. They looked at Gerald to get his reaction, and he gave everyone a grand smile meant to say, I’m in no matter what.

“We have to play this game somewhere inside,” said Alice, taking the cards. “We need a table and maybe another room too.”

“My brother is here watching TV,” said Emily, referring to Jason, her 16 year brother, “but we can go upstairs to the playroom. There’s another room there with some junk on the floor.”

“Oh,” said Abigail smugly, ‘We’ll have to see if Jason wants to play at some point.” She shared a lighthearted look of conspiracy with her sister.

“If only,” said Alice bravely.

The playroom was a large arched room filling most of the attic. Short walls lined with bookshelves led to the slanted walls that arched up to the ceiling. Everything was painted white. There was a long, beat up, blotched wooden table in the middle surrounded by chairs. Gathering around it, Alice popped the plastic wrap off the package and shook the cards onto the table. They strewed into a ragged pile of glossy, stiff, and inviting symbols, so inviting that everyone instinctively grabbed and picked up some of them just to hold and examine. They laughed together at the common reaction. Emily pressed her handful of cards against her chest with fondness, then dropped them back onto the table.

“Here are the rules,” announced Alice.

Abigail let out a soft, whimpering laugh which interrupted Alice. She moved around the room studying it, and whispered something in Emily’s ear. Emily’s eyes widened appreciatively. She looked back at Abigail with amazement, then looked at Alice and said incredulously just the single word, “really,” and then turned and gave Gerald a snickering omniscient scan of appraisal, her eyes traveling up and down the entire length of him.

Gerald returned her look with one of awakened oblivion. He had been friends with these girls most of his life and could not bring himself to sense uneasiness, but then the odd thing happened in that Emily and Alice and Abigail all went into the other room for a minute, leaving Gerald alone, and their barely audible whispering shot through the door right into him, their hushed group sounding so quietly excited, triggering an ineffable stirring in his body. He became cognizant of a change to his physical state, how he was zinging with the faintest pageantry of exhilaration, awakening a greater awareness of the surroundings, of the upcoming game, and of who might do what with whom. His face lit up, his eyes bolted awake. His urge to play expanded, and he found himself feeling light, pliant, willing, ready.

The girls came back, all three of them trying to hide an open interest in Gerald by patently ignoring him. They went to the table and focused on the cards. Fluttering lightness continued in Gerald’s body, finding its way everywhere.

“Like I was saying, “ said Alice, “the rule for number cards 2 to 10 is first base. Jacks are second base. Kings, queens, and aces are third base. Jokers are card holder’s choice, but we don’t go all the way.”

She sat in a chair and took her time inexpertly shuffling the cards, spilling them onto the table, peevishly rearranging them by hand. When she thought she was done, she put them in a stack. As she did this, Gerald reviewed in his head the meanings of these bases. First base was kissing, he knew, and second base was using your hands to feel the other person. Third base? Gerald wasn’t sure.

“OK, we take turns. I go first. All girls go first.” Alice confidently drew a card off the top and showed it to everybody. It was an 8 of clubs.

“That’s first base,” said Abigail. “Kiss someone.”

The girls’ eyes went briefly to her and then shifted away to land with permanence on Gerald, the only boy.

Gerald dared not move. The idea that he was about to be kissed by a girl seemed oddly affecting to him, as though, if it had to happen some time in his life, it might as well be now. He felt fidgety but he felt ready for it. Electricity waved through him with force as he turned his face to meet Alice who walked over and proceeded to give him a real kiss on the lips. Her soft lips pressed on his with tenderness and his thoughts turned inward with amazement at the touch of the girl. He was moved to a suddenly heightened awareness of being the lone male. His thoughts whirled into chaos, and his body grew tense and anxious. His penis seemed to wake up out of nowhere.

Alice pulled away and said to the room at large, “Well, how’d you like that?”

There was unequivocal silence, tough and busy. Everyone watched the two of them for a moment. Then Abigail said, “Now Alice has kissed Gerald. She doesn’t have to do that again.”

“What if she draws another first base card?” Asked Emily with genuine interest.

“Girls club rules say she can skip it if she wants, or invoke the girl’s choice rule” answered Abigail.

Emily had been paying close attention when Alice kissed Gerald. She had watched both of their faces, and saw what she thought was calculated indifference in Alice, but when she pulled away Emily saw that Gerald was flush with embarrassment. She wondered why he was so affected. Was it because maybe he enjoyed it, and that he was turning red from that and maybe also because he was incapable of hiding before all the girls how embarrassing it was to be kissed by a girl.

Then she saw him quickly drop a hand to his crotch and with the deftest of movements adjust his clothing, and something new occurred to her about what might be happening to him. She got his attention by theatrically covering her mouth with one hand as if to say, oh no! I saw that! And when he did look at her, which she knew eventually her actions would cause him to do, she gave him a knowing smile. The effect of this was apparently to cause Gerald to sit down, for he winced and squirmed into a seat in one of the chairs.

“Abigail next,” announced Emily liltingly, eying Gerald mostly. She was beginning to enjoy herself more than she had expected she might.

Everyone watched as Abigail sat down at the cards and slowly pulled the top card away and turned it over in her hand to reveal a 2 of spades. She banged it down on the table and rather matter of factly said, “I have to kiss Gerald too.”

“No,” said Alice. “Gerald has to kiss you. Or at least you have to kiss each other.” This distinction in ownership of the act made sense to them all.

“Yes, kiss each other,” said Emily.

“No, it’s OK,” said Abigail peacefully. She stood up and went over the where Gerald sat in his chair. “C’mon,” she said, encouraging him to stand up.

Gerald’s complexion was still flushed from the kiss from Alice, but his eyes had returned to the room, looking bright and aware. Very reluctantly he stood up, and Emily clearly could tell that something about being a male had begun working its magic on him. “I think he needs to kiss Abigail with his eyes open,” offered Emily.

“Good idea,” said Alice. “Strategy, I think you call it,” she said observationally.

Abigail planted a soft-lipped and prolonged kiss on Gerald, who did keep his eyes open. He looked at Abigail with fierce intensity and tried to kiss her back, but he did not move or flinch or react in any other way. It was ever so slightly less novel than the first kiss with Alice. But the look in his eyes was one of wonder and greed, and after they had parted and Gerald was back in the chair, Emily could sense that something about him was changing.

In a hurry, Emily then took the seat at the cards and lifted the top card, which turned out to be a 4 of hearts.

“My turn,” she announced. “After this, we all will have kissed Gerald. If we keep this up, something’s got to give.”

For Gerald, the erotic excitement of kissing or being kissed by a girl, the soft, warm, receptive touch of a girl’s lips covering his, felt somewhere between fine and abnormal. He replayed the lurid physical sensations of it in his mind, and as he did, he relished that they were new and wondrous. The effect of it put his mind in high gear, and he began trying to make sense of the fact that they were all doing this together, that there were no scruples in anyone’s actions. Like nothing in his life before, it started to blend the seeds of lust into his psyche, and for the first time in his young life truly uncontrollable arousal rose up hot and fantastical from the natural abyss within. He was spellbound by it, carried on a wave of it, and feeling intense shame lest he be the only one unable to conceal such excitement.

Emily approached him, her eyes dark, wide and free. “Are you ready for a real kiss?” She asked with good humor. She came before him and beckoned him up from the chair like a cheerleader waving both hands palms up in an upward fashion. He rose mechanically. She gave him a riveting look, full of challenge. Her face seemed to Gerald to be one big invitation.

“Eyes open, now,” she admonished him.

He looked back at her with longing and sheepishly said, “I’m ready.” The slow, steady drumbeat of far away desire moved him forward. Their faces came together. Emily looked at him and Gerald found himself fixated looking back into Emily’s steady, spacious black eyes and sensing the existential well of allure deep behind them. Her eyes beckoned and he wanted to pour himself into her.

To his utter amazement, when Emily kissed him, she opened her mouth a little and lushly licked both his lips with her soft, flat tongue. He dared not move. Chemistry poured into his bloodstream. Her eyes were suddenly brimming with light and never left his. His physical body began slipping away, and soon a full erection sprouted fabulously in the confines of his shorts, at least partially disguised by the surrounding material. It felt sensational, stiff and hot and swollen, and he was preoccupied with it and whether he could hide it from all three girls.

The Mullwest twins, watching the kiss, looked at each other and nodded their heads ostentatiously. As Emily pulled back from Gerald, their view took in his entire body, and for the most part they saw that Gerald was pink with embarrassment. It took them by surprise that when it was over he stood stock still. Never having truly pondered the male form, they had only the crudest expectation of a penis let alone an erection, and therefore weren’t looking for one. But it was hugely obvious from the front of his shorts that Gerald was now fully aroused. They studied him with new appreciation, enjoying the scene before them, both thinking that the girls club was playing out far better than they hoped it would.

“Gerald’s turn, “ said Alice, offering him the cards with a gesture of her hand, openly examining his crotch. He looked at her with a touch of fright, but he sat down and pulled a card off the top of the pack. It was the King of hearts.