Chapter 5C

I shrugged.

She said, "I mean, seriously. Talk."

I shrugged again. "Not really."

"I do," she persisted.

So I sighed wearily and moved into the same pose as she, facing her, my head propped on one elbow. "All right, but I don't need a baby-sitter to put me to bed."

"I don't know what to do with you. About you. You're spoiled. You're too independent. I know you don't like all your fussy old aunts and uncles so much, but you have to admit they spoiled the heck out of you. And, brother, did I help! You are so strange. In so many ways you're older than me, in the ways you connect with certain things inside people, but... such a strange boy."

"Boy," I echoed petulantly.

"Well, Speedy, you *are* a boy... No, no, no, you are what looks like a boy, you do boy things, you have boy habits. But you're not really a boy. Wars took your boy away from you. I did, too. I'm going to die and go to hell for it."

I grumbled, "Oh, That's what the nuns say all the time..."

"Do you know what I mean when I say I'm going to hell for it?"

"... and you say that all the time, too."

"I know, but do you know what I mean?"

"I guess. No."

"I'm in hell for it now, Speedy. I'm in hell every day thinking about this and about us."

"You mean... 'this' and 'us' being... ?"

She said, "You know what I'm talking about."

I felt a crashing, cutting disappointment. All I could say was, "Oh."

She slowed down and said, "I'm not kicking blame in your face, Speedy, I'm just telling you how I feel. I think what we did together was very unusual. Very out of control. I don't think I will ever be able to be like that with anyone else again, as long as I live."

"I didn't know you felt so bad about it."

"No no no no no, not 'bad'," she moaned, beating her fists lightly on the bedsheet. "Not 'bad'!" She beat her fist again, once for each word: "You... don't... understand."

"Explain it to me."

"I am explaining it to you!"

"Okay."

"You don't understand that... I... that I *did* like it. I liked it more than anything. I'm trying to tell you that I... that I know, looking at you right here and now, that I know I'll never be able to do that with anyone else. Not in that way."

"Not--?"

She waited for me. "Not what?"

I continued hesitantly, "Not even... with your boyfr--"

She stopped me. "Not even with my boyfriend."

"Hm."

"And he's not my boyfriend any more."

"Hm."

"Believe me?"

I shrugged: a sort of, a maybe.

"I'm trying to tell you, Speedy, my dear sweet little man, my somehow grownup, somehow not grownup little man -- Oh my, my, you are so grownup in bed, but out of bed you are so strange. I'm trying to tell you that... I liked it... But... I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid of myself. You do something to me, we have something, we do something to each other that--" She stopped. "Yes, I had this boyfriend but it wasn't the same, it's not--" She stopped again and sighed impatiently. "Oh, heck!"

I guessed, "You think it was wrong?"

She shook her head no, dismissing my question. Then she sighed. "I have this problem."

"Problem?"

"Yes." She pulled on a damp strand of her hair and then picked a little crumb of something off her tongue and couldn't find it again and just gave up. "The problem is... I still remember it."

"Oh."

"Yes, 'Oh'. I remember, and I -- ah, this is so complicated."

I sat up. In some ways this was beyond me. In some other strange way, I sensed what she was saying. I said, "Maybe we shouldn't have done it."

She looked suddenly and deeply into my eyes. There was consternation, frustration, impatience in her eyes and face.

I went on, "I mean, what we were doing makes you feel bad and you think you're going to hell, so we shouldn't have done it."

"Oh... !?" She squinted at me. "Tell me something: did you think we would do it again the next time you saw me?"

"Not especially."

"Oh, be honest."

"Mmm, no."

"But you sort of hoped we would," she prompted.

"Mmm, yeah."

"But if you think it hurts my feelings, you wouldn't ask me?"

"Right."

She stared at me darkly. "I should have known you'd say that. I should have known." She played with her wet hair again, and lay back on a pillow. "Let me ask you something. Did you really find yourself thinking about it? I mean, thinking about it a lot?"

"I guess... I didn't think about it a *lot*, but it made me sad when it looked like... well, it looked like you'd just gone off and forgotten all about it."

"I see..." she mused. "But you thought about it."

"Sure I did. For a while."

"I see..." She lowered her voice, sounding more sympathetic and plaintive, and began again. "When I saw you again in that kitchen, so worried about what I'd feel or what you'd do with your Mama there looking at us... do you know what I was thinking, after not seeing you for so long?"

I shook my head no. How the hell would I know what she was thinking?

She smirked. "I hope you don't grow up to be like one of those good looking hotshots that I don't want you to grow up to be. Darn, that's what's so strange about you, and me *with* you... If only we weren't so good at it together, then neither of us would always be expecting that it's supposed to happen that way all the time." She shook her head ruefully. "Do you have any idea at all what you would have to do to seduce me, to make me do it?"

"You mean... like really *make* you do it with me?"

"Yes."

"It wouldn't be the same."

"Why?"

"Because you wouldn't want to do it."

"I see," she said, pondering again. She squinted at me. "I wish you were twenty. I wish you were thirty. I wish..." She stopped, searching my eyes.

I was looking down, away from her, absently toying with a wrinkle in the bedsheets. She leaned forward and forced herself into my view. "Have you ever made yourself cum?"

I blushed strongly, hanging my head as low as I could to avoid her gaze. I shrugged.

"You haven't. I'll bet you're telling the truth, too. I took your boy but I didn't give you enough man to work with, did I? And you made it so good for me."

This chat was annoying me. Talking with adults was something I never, simply never enjoyed. They had such a baffling way of complicating matters. As I did with other adults when they wanted a "serious" discussion, I tried to appear unaffected. Now, as Martha Jane talked with me that night, the room seemed crowded and too small to hold the thoughts I was trying to keep from her. I felt alienated from her, especially now that she had so obviously begun her move from a teenager to a woman, a woman who worked for a paycheck, studied in a college, went out with other people her own age who lived in a world that I was totally unfamiliar with. It was an odd and unsettling sensation for me to feel that way about Martha Jane.

She went on with difficulty. "I don't know what it is we... we do to each other..." Absently she started to reach toward my thigh, but stopped. "You want *me* to ask *you* to do it?"

Still propped on my elbow, I shrugged again. "Sort of... I mean, the only time I used to know you wanted to was when you said you did."

"I... see..." she said ominously, looking at her own hands and appearing troubled by my reply. She rolled onto her tummy and crossed her ankles in the air behind her.

She asked, "Why did you feel so bad when you didn't find me at Woolworth's? Hm? I really want to know, Speedy. Was your mama right, were you down in the dumps?"

I gave shrug number one thousand or so. "I don't know," I pouted. "That was a long time ago."

"Oh, baby, that's not an answer. C'mon, talk to me."

"I don't know. I just... didn't know what else to do."

She prompted in a singsong voice, "You could have come ba-a-ack... on a different day-y-y."

I didn't say anything. She was right, I could have gone back and looked for her again. I didn't know what she was getting at.

In the same singsong she continued: "You could have... mmm... called my mother... called my sister."

I blushed again, but I was also a little hostile. All I could do was lower my head and say, "Well..."

"Speedy, why didn't you ever call me after I left home and moved into an apartment?"

That remark left me slightly bristling. "I *did* call. Evelyn gave me a number. But they told me you had moved to another place."

"Why didn't you look for me again? I was very busy at first, I was so busy I didn't sleep. Half the time I'd eat breakfast or lunch walking between classes. And after a few months, I heard nothing. I said to myself, okay, so what, the kid's only ten years old, how does he know what to do? What should I expect? And I met boys, nice boys, interesting people, friends--for the first time in my life. And after a while I figured, well, he's growing, he has his own things, his own life... Maybe he doesn't want to see me, maybe he doesn't even remember who I am." She waited, looking down at the bed. "We really didn't have to see each other, period. We could have just talked. We could have just said hello. We were still friends, weren't we?" She looked at me, a hint of pleading eyes. "We were so close, we'd been through so much together. What happened? Why didn't I hear anything from you? Even my mother said she never saw you, not once."

I remember the day I had gone to her front door, and no one answered. Apologetically, I told her about it.

"But, Speedy, how many times did you knock on the door? How many times did you walk next door to see where I was?"

I shrugged. I didn't answer.

"Come on, how many times?"

"Once."

"Once?"

I nodded. I held up one finger. I avoided her eyes. I was getting the point.

She repeated, angry, incredulous, "You went to my house *once*? That was it? Once?"

I nodded. I saw her anger mounting. I wanted to run away. I had never seen her angry with me. I began to shuffle around in the bed, looking for an excuse to get away and relieve the tension for a while. "I think I have to go to the--"

"No you don't, buster." She held me down by one hand, which she pressed tightly into the mattress. "Now just let me calm down a minute," she said, and she sighed two long sighs and then she let go of my hand. She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, and squinted. "Oh my, I have so much work to do with you! You're like a wild boy that's grown up in an uninhabited forest, without parents, without friends, without--" She shook her head and sighed heavily again.