Chapter 2

The junk food actually helped. His glucose level was high when she urged him to take longer steps on the way back to the house. At one point she linked her elbow through his and tried to get him to match her stride. Her soft breast rubbed against his arm and distracted him from the discomfort and, to his surprise, he found himself with a stride that made him feel younger. He was sweaty, breathing hard, and his hips ached when they got home, though, and he shuffled like an old man as soon as they got in the house. When he complained about it, Mai Li told him to take a shower and she’d work on his hips.

In the shower Bobby stood under the pounding water, leaning against the wall on both arms. He was thinking about Mai Li “working on his hips” and how he might get hard again if she touched him like she had, before. He was mildly astonished when he looked down and saw he was already hard. Bobby had been awake for six months, at that point. He’d had some erections, now and then, in that time, but they had been few and far between, at least before Mai Li got there. And he’d never felt like jerking off when he’d had one; hadn’t felt the urge to deal with his erections in that way. He just wasn’t ... interested enough.

Now, though, as he thought back to the dozens of times he’d stared at the deep crevice between Mai Li’s breasts, he was ... interested.

It felt odd to reach and grip his prong. At the same time it felt familiar, like riding a bike again after years of walking. His muscles remembered what to do and he stroked faster and faster. He closed his eyes and imagined Mai Li getting ready that morning, before she put on that halter top. He imagined her naked breasts, and nipples on those breasts. He was right on the verge of cumming, breathing hard, when the seizure hit him.

It was a grand mal seizure and it robbed him of all control over his body. When the tonic phase hit him he went rigid and lost his balance, leaning sideways. His shoulder hit the glass door and it slammed open, crashing against the wall. It didn’t break, but only because it was tempered glass. His head glanced off the plastic clothes hamper, which skittered into the commode and fell over. His shoulder hit the floor with a thump.

Mai Li just happened to be walking by the bathroom door, on her way to her room, when she heard the door slam into the wall and the other sounds associated with his fall. She went to the door and tapped.

“Bobby?”

Nothing.

She only asked one more time, a little louder, before she violated his privacy to make sure he was okay. He was in the clonic phase of his seizure when she saw his wet, naked body lying half in and half out of the shower. He was jerking and his head was hitting the bottom of the hamper, so she hurried to pull him away from anything that could endanger him. The easiest way to protect him was to sit down and pull him onto her lap, holding his head against her upper torso as the tremors wracked his body.

“It’s okay,” she said, soothingly, stroking his wet hair. “It’s okay, Bobby. I’m right here.”

Her eyes did a quite normal scan of his body, looking for signs of injury. It could be argued that it was inevitable that she saw his penis. It was still quite firm and it looked entirely different than any penis she’d ever seen before, at least in real life. The organs of the men she’d had sex with had all been circumcised. This one was not. She hadn’t really gotten a good look at any of the ones that had gone in her until Raoul, in college. His had been very pink, very bent, and slim, compared to the one she was looking at now, as she cradled Bobby’s head. Bobby’s organ was very white, and very straight, with a uniform thickness along its length. She knew, academically, that the tip was covered with a foreskin, which looked both interesting and a little gross. It didn’t look like a penis, exactly, but she knew it was. It was both thicker and longer than Raoul’s, but it didn’t look scary or anything. It just looked odd.

Before she could reflect on his manhood further, he came around. He woke to find his nose firmly buried in the cleavage he’d stared at so often that day, though he wasn’t aware of that immediately. It took him maybe thirty seconds of rubbing his face against her breasts, while she cooed at him that he was fine, and it was over, before his mental faculties fully returned. His concentration, once he did realize where his nose was, centered on that fact, and only when he began to recognize where they were did he also realize he was naked.

“Shit!” he groaned. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, still stroking his hair. “You had a seizure while you were in the shower. I heard you fall. You were thrashing around and the easiest way to protect you was to hold you like this. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

Reluctantly he found the floor with his hand and pushed away, lifting his face away from her chest. He looked down and saw his bone and, groaning, covered it with his free hand.

“I’m sorry,” he moaned again.

“Bobby!” Her voice was too loud and he winced. “Stop apologizing for being normal.”

“I’m not normal,” he said, also too loudly. “I have seizures and I can’t control myself!”

She helped him get off of her and then stood to help him up.

“Look,” she said. “If I’m not worried about your seizures, or your so-called lack of control, then it bothers me that you are. I’ve seen erections before. I’m not afraid of you or your erections. What I am afraid of is that you being embarrassed about it will cause problems with your recovery. So get over it, okay? Please? Let me help you and let me be comfortable about being around you.”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “How can you not be freaked out?”

Mai Li had a small epiphany at that point, primarily because there was a whining tenor to his voice that made him sound younger than he looked. The epiphany was that he was younger than he looked. Mentally, Bobby was still fifteen. Emotionally he was fifteen, as well. His social development had been suspended by the coma and his unusual circumstances. Physically, his body might be three years older, but sexually he was still just a clueless teenager who didn’t understand the hormones raging through his body.

She didn’t feel like she was a beautiful woman. She knew men viewed her that way, but when she looked in the mirror she didn’t see what they saw. Still, she could imagine that Bobby, who seemed pretty normal, in terms of his male-ness, might react to her on a biological level in the same way other men did. She had avoided thinking about his erections after she massaged him. Now she wondered if his current boner was the result of the seizure ... or something else.

“Well, let’s talk about that, then,” she said. “If you’re game. I don’t want to embarrass you.”

“Talk about what, exactly?” he asked. “Can I get dressed?”

“Of course!” she groaned. “I’m sorry. I was thinking so hard about things that I forgot you were still naked. And wet!” She reached for a towel on the bar and handed it to him. “You go get dressed and then we’ll talk.”

He took two unsteady steps while running the towel across his body and she changed her mind.

“Wait. I’m worried you’ll fall or have another seizure. I’m going with you but I won’t watch while you get dressed, okay?” She reached into the shower stall and turned off the water.

“Do I have a choice?” he asked, sullenly. “You’ve already seen me like this. It’s not like you can pretend you never saw me wet and naked on the bathroom floor.”

“Look,” she said. “I had a choice, a few moments ago. When I realized what had happened, I could have called 911 and had them come deal with you. But I decided I could help you faster so I did that. Would it have made you feel better if two complete strangers had seen you wet and naked on the bathroom floor?”

“The seizure would have been over by the time they got here,” he argued.

“So you’d rather I just wait outside the door while you thrash around and split your head open?” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“I don’t know what I’d rather,” he grumbled.

She poked him with a sharp fingernail.

“Move, Buster,” she ordered. “You need to get dressed so we can have this conversation in a civilized manner.”

She followed him to his room, watching his skinny, pale butt as he moved the ten feet between the bathroom door and the door to his room. She left the bedroom door open and leaned against the jamb, breaking her promise not to watch him as he dressed. Whether it was a natural process or the result of embarrassment, his erection had wilted by the time she saw him pull up his shorts and cinch them around his waist with a belt. If he saw her watching him, he gave no notice and within five minutes of leaving the bathroom he was clothed. He put on leather moccasins and turned to face her.

She looked at her watch. It was three P.M.

“Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Show me around town. You’ve lived here all your life, right?”

“Yeah.” His voice sounded neutral, but neutral was better than grumbly, so she took it.

“So show me around. I’m going to be living here for the next few months or so and I need to know where things are.”

“Okay.”

Her car was an eight-year-old Subaru Forester that looked rough but wasn’t high-mileage. The previous owner had gotten in a fender bender and had apparently used any insurance payout for things other than repairing the damage. She’d bought it because she didn’t care about the dents and scrapes and it had room for her to put her things in when she moved. The passenger door creaked when he got in and he had to slam it twice to get it closed and latched. When they pulled away from the house she drove aimlessly, waiting for him to tell her where to go. That didn’t happen until she ended up on a dead-end road and had to turn around.

“I don’t know where to go,” she pointed out, gently. “Where’s your old school?”

“Go that way,” he finally said, pointing to the left.

The high school he’d attended for six months before the accident was situated between the KU campus and the campus of the Haskell Indian Nations University, so they spent almost an hour in that part of town while she got him to tell her what he knew about both universities. Slowly his mood lightened and they began to have a normal conversation. He directed her to highway 59 and showed her the shopping area in south Lawrence, where the Walmart and big box stores were. When she saw a park with swings, she pulled into the parking lot and turned the car off.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

“Swinging,” she said.

He looked skeptical, but got out and followed her to a long swing set made of thick pipe that had six swings hanging from it. She sat in one and kicked off, swinging four or five feet while she reached up and gripped the chains. Bobby just watched as she waited, slowly swinging back and forth. Eventually he sat on the swing next to her, but didn’t make it move.

“Let’s talk about your erections,” she said, suddenly.

“Let’s not,” he said. His grumbly voice was back.

“I’m not a virgin,” she said, again, suddenly. “Are you?”

“You can’t ask something like that!” he retorted.

“Why not?”

“Because you just can’t,” he said. “How would you feel if I asked you something like that?”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “I already told you I’m not.”

“Oh,” he said, blinking. “Yeah.” His foot dug in and he moved the swing ten inches. “So ... why did you tell me that?”

“Because I wanted you to understand that I do not find an erection to be a strange or exotic and troubling thing to deal with.”

“Deal with?” His reaction was less thought-out and more based in curiosity.

“I didn’t mean I’d be dealing with it ... yours,” she said, as she realized how that phrase might have sounded. “I just meant that being around a guy who gets that way doesn’t freak me out. You asked why I don’t get freaked out, and I’m trying to explain that, now.”

“Okay, but I don’t understand why any of this matters,” he said.

“It matters because you and I are going to live together for the foreseeable future and it’s likely that what happened today will happen again and I don’t want you to be freaked out about it.”

“I can’t help it,” he groaned. “Nobody’s seen me like that since I was in the hospital.”

“You got erections while you were in the hospital?”

“No,” he moaned. “At least not like ... these.”

“Didn’t they give you sponge baths?” Her implication was that, during such sponge baths, his organ would have been manipulated and might have reacted to that.

“Yes, but none of them looked like you.”

“Ahhh,” she said. “Now we get to the meat of the matter. How, exactly, do I look?”

He was silent for long enough she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“I don’t want you to get mad at me,” he finally said.

“Why would I get mad? I asked you to tell me, so I can’t get angry if you answer me, right?”

“Okay, you’re beautiful and sexy. There. Are you upset because I think you’re sexy?”

“No,” she said, calmly. “I don’t agree with you, but it doesn’t bother me that you think that.”

“I stare at your boobs all the time,” he confessed.

“I know. I see you doing it.”

“And that doesn’t make you mad?”

“Guys look at women’s boobs,” she said. “And at their asses and legs and all that. It’s normal. It can be rude if they do it too obviously, but I’m not one of those women who yell that men shouldn’t look at women or think about women as sexual beings. Mother Nature made men to be that way. It’s not their fault. Sure, I think a guy should be polite about it, but he can’t just turn off that impulse. Just like he can’t turn off the process that makes his penis get hard. What controls that is so deep in a man’s psyche that it’s untouchable by his conscious processes.”

“You’re very strange,” sighed Bobby.

“I’m not strange at all,” she argued. “I’m as normal as the day is long. That’s the whole point. We’re both normal. Yes, you have some challenges to overcome, but there’s no reason in the world we can’t be comfortable around each other like normal people are comfortable around each other.”

“So if I get another boner it won’t bother you?” His sarcasm was less virulent, but was still there.

“Actually,” she said, looking around like a spy afraid of being caught. Her voice was lowered and she leaned toward him. “You have a pretty impressive one. I shouldn’t like it, but I have to say I’m impressed.”

She leaned back as if what she’d said was more akin to, “I can live with it. I won’t tell anybody if you don’t.” She kicked off again and started swinging her legs, increasing the length of her swing.

“I can’t believe you said that,” he gasped.

“Why? It’s just the truth,” she said. “I’ve only seen a few, but you have nothing to be ashamed of. Not at all. I’d even say it was handsome.”

“I can’t believe you said that, either,” he blurted.

By now she was moving in an arc with eight feet between the end points, and was going steadily higher.

“I’m just sayin’,” she said, leaning back and thrusting her legs out straight. “I bet I can go higher than you.”

Her change of subject was what he needed to shake him out of the shock of hearing her compliment his penis. That had been a first and it had shocked him. Part of that was simply because of the innate taboo of saying something like that at all, especially to someone who was a virtual stranger. But it went deeper than that. He did think she was sexy. He also thought of her as untouchable. She was older than him and gorgeous and could have any man she set her sights on. That she thought his cock was ... handsome?! ... struck a chord in him that vibrated deep in his bones.

She was still untouchable ... out of reach ... unavailable as a member of the opposite sex, but her status had changed, somehow. It was as if the wall between them was now made of glass, maybe, rather than granite blocks. He was suddenly full of energy and her challenge let him think about something else. He kicked the dirt with both feet and started trying to do what she was doing. It was also like riding a bicycle in the sense that he knew how to make the swing go higher. His still under-developed muscles didn’t cooperate with him, though, and he felt uncoordinated as he asked them to do something they refused to comply with. He tried, though, and he tried with a gusto that was uncharacteristic for him.

“I win!” she crowed as she held her legs straight and let gravity begin to slow her down.

“Not fair!” he complained. “I just got started!”

“I still win,” she said. “You’re doing a good job, though. Keep going.”

He was able to maintain his current level and found that his body worked better at doing that than trying to go higher. He felt an ache in his arms that he knew was because the muscles in them weren’t used to being used. His legs felt fine. In fact all the rest of him felt fine. She jumped a few feet, abandoning her seat, and stood watching him. She was breathing deeply and he stared as her breasts rose and fell.

“You’re staring at my boobs again,” she said.

“I am,” he admitted. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“I still don’t get that,” he said, kicking his legs more easily, now.

“I just don’t mind it when a man I like looks at my boobs,” she said.

“You like me?” His voice rose a bit.

Her adult mind heard that question coming from a fifteen-year-old mind, where it mattered a lot whether someone of the opposite sex “liked you” or not.

“You’re okay,” she said, carelessly. “I don’t hate you. That’s for sure.”

He quit pumping and let his swing slow down.

“You’re so strange,” he said, again.

“Nope,” she said. “Not strange at all. C’mon. Let’s go find some ice cream.”

They were sitting in the car, parked in the lot of the Cold Stone Creamery. He’d ordered a shake and she was nipping at the top scoop of a double. He watched her lips as they teased the pink ice cream and was unable to stop himself from thinking about what else those lips might have nipped at. Knowing she wasn’t a virgin had led him down a path he wasn’t really comfortable being on, but he couldn’t help it. No girl had ever done that to him, but his imagination supplied details anyway. She glanced at him with her Asian eyes occasionally and he wondered if she could tell what was going through his mind.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said, just to break the silence.

“There weren’t any Asian girls in your school?”

“There was one, but I never talked to her,” he answered.

“What was her name?”

“I don’t even know,” he sighed.

“Well, she was probably a lot like me,” said Mai Li. “Most girls are quite similar.”

“No they’re not,” he said, automatically.

“We are!” she insisted. “Look, put aside all that nonsense about how we look different so we must be different. We all worry about the same stuff, and have similar dreams and challenges in life. People are pretty much alike, in my opinion.”

“I never met a girl who would talk about the stuff we’ve been talking about,” he argued.

“Okay, I admit that most girls wouldn’t bring up your erections in casual conversation,” she said, “but our circumstances are different. It’s important that this ‘stuff’, as you call it, doesn’t inhibit our plan to get you better. That’s the only reason I brought it up. I don’t want it to get in the way of our work.”

“I understand that part,” he said. “I’m just not used to things being that ... open. I mean my own mother wouldn’t talk to me about ... that.”

“How do you know? Have you ever asked her?”

“Right,” he groaned. “I can just see me going to her and saying, ‘Hey, Mom. I get these boners and I don’t know what to do about them.’ That would go over like a lead balloon.”

“Well, if you said it like that it might not go well,” said Mai Li. “But if you approached it a little less confrontationally she might be happy to advise you. In my experience mothers are very interested in their children’s welfare and concerns. It might be uncomfortable, but I bet she’d talk about it with you.”

“I think I’ll just leave things like they are,” he said.

“Good. That’s progress.”

“How, exactly is that progress?”

“It’s progress because it means things are cool between us. That’s what I was going for in the first place.”

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