Chapter 32

Now I don’t claim to be some sort of genius, but I’ve always considered myself fairly bright, know what I mean? I didn’t have much trouble understanding concepts at school, I read books for the enjoyment of it, and, for the most part, I understood and followed instructions. So why, I ask myself, do I always get it wrong when it comes to women? Take Karla Hernandez for instance.

When the final bell put an end to my day of drudgery, I waited by the exit door so I could walk Karla out to Cindi’s car. The whole deal of Cindi suddenly giving rides to Karla was something the girls dreamed up so Karla didn’t have to ride the bus. Her brother wouldn’t let her ride with him because he rode the bus at fifteen and had decided she should, too. The three of us talked for a few minutes once we reached Cindi’s car. I collected a couple of cheek kisses and headed off to baseball practice.

We were practicing for an hour on the days we didn’t have a game this early in the season. When we started playing two or three games a week, we’d have a short practice before home games. I was holding down right field during batting practice when Jose Hernandez – JJ’s father, and a former catcher in the Mexican Baseball League – arrived. Jose Senior worked with our teams’ pitchers one day a week.

I approached Mister Hernandez after practice. I wasn’t as nervous about asking permission to date Karla as I had been Caroline. Mister Hernandez knew me now and I think he knew I tried hard to be one of the good guys.

“Buenas tardes, Senor Hernandez,” I started the conversation ball rolling.

My mangled attempt to spout High School Spanish made him chuckle.

“Your accent is terrible, Yonny,” he replied in English that was much better than my Spanish.

“I was trying to impress you so you would let me date Karla,” I said with a laugh.

He surprised the crap out of me with his answer.

He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Maria says you are the only boy Karla can date. I think so, too. You will treat her with the same respect you showed Carolina, yes?”

Not what I was expecting, but I was quick to agree.

“You can count on it, Sir,” I promised.

That night I called Elaine and related the conversation with Karla’s dad.

“How far do you expect this to go?” I asked.

“I expect you to rock her world, Johnny so her first experiences are good ones. She isn’t one of us, but I see her maybe being a friend with benefits. Let’s call her a temporary Harem Girl,” she said with a laugh.

Her seemingly callous attitude towards Karla irritated me.

“I’m not going to sleep with her for sport, Elaine. You know I don’t do that,” I said with some anger in my voice.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” she fired back, “If you think that I would want you to do that, you can drop dead!”

Then she hung up on me.

Uh oh! That didn’t go well. I should have remembered Elaine had a temper and that I suffered from foot-in-mouth disease. I grabbed my keys and sprinted out the door. Fifteen minutes later I was ringing the Cavanaugh’s doorbell.

The door swung open and I was temporarily speechless. I expected Mister Cavanaugh so of course, for the first time ever Missus Cavanaugh answered the door. She looked at me expectantly, head tilted to the side. I blushed and asked if I could come in and speak to Elaine. She gave me a sympathetic smile.

“You might want to wait on that until tomorrow, Johnny. She is not happy with you right now.”

“Yes, Ma’am, and she probably has a right to be. But I was taught that you don’t put off problems, you deal with them as soon as you can,” I replied.

Missus Cavanaugh nodded and pointed up the stairs.

“You are a brave man, Gunga Din,” she said.

Who the heck was this Gunga Din, I wondered as I went up the stairs two at a time.

You don’t really need the particulars, just know some world class groveling went on in the twin’s rec room. Elaine finally forgave me. We kissed and cuddled on the couch but, disappointingly, we didn’t have time for make-up sex.

Friday night rolled around and Karla, looking too good to be real, was perched in the passenger seat of my truck. We were on our way to the Cineplex to meet up with Cindi and the twin terrors for a group movie date ... or so I thought. The reality was that Karla and I were herded to the back row and squeezed into the rear corner of the theater. As we took our seats Elaine whispered in my ear.

“Tingle her, Johnny, she is like us that way.”

I knew that from our first kiss, but I had yet to try to connect with her. I thought I was being noble, everyone else thought I was being stupid.

The girls were watching ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ It was as interesting to me as watching paint dry, and Karla didn’t seem into it either. With nothing else to do I taught her the fine art of a hot and heavy teenage make out session. Karla was tentative at first but it only took her a minute to figure out French kissing. And it turns out I didn’t need to ‘tingle’ her because she was radiating sex like an air raid siren. In fact, she was the one who put my hand on her substantial boob when I was slow doing it on my own. It was long until her shirt was unbuttoned, and her bra unfastened. If she hadn’t been wearing jean too tight for me to get into or her to get out of, there is no telling how the evening would have ended. Elaine, Ellen, and Cindi were zero help in slowing things down as they encouraged Karla by keeping us screened from the rest of the theater.

I had Karla home by ten, I was at the Cavanaugh’s at ten-fifteen, and buck ass naked in the twin’s rec room by ten-thirty. Turns out the waves of lust rolling off Karla and me, affected them too.

I dated Karla for another month and every day she became a more confident person. I might have been responsible for some of it but most of the credit goes to Cindi and the twins and the example they set. The five of us had the entire school scratching their heads because of our unconventional relationship. We didn’t advertise it, but it was hard to miss the affection between us.

Karla had always been a good student, but she was shy and reticent. Now she was participating in class and getting noticed. One subject in which Karla excelled was sex education. Karla hid her raw sexuality just as her sister Caroline had. She wore conservative clothes and was all business in school.

When she was alone with me, it was a different story. She had nice legs under that world class booty, and she loved wearing little low cut, above the knee sundresses, just for lucky me.

As always happened with girls I connected with, I developed feelings for Karla. Because of that I couldn’t pull the trigger on taking her virginity. We did everything else, and we came close more than once. Karla got tired of waiting for me to take things further and started dating this guy we knew from Mass. He was a senior like me and handsome like Richie Caldwell. Suddenly she was dressing up for him instead of me. Caroline told me she was training him to treat her the way I did and that when he was capable enough, she was going to sleep with him. He was a lucky guy.

My girlfriends were not upset with the way I handled things. Although they said they wouldn’t have minded me sleeping with Karla, I think they appreciated how I managed to stay mostly faithful. Best of all Karla remained our friend.

While all this was happening, the baseball season continued. Our team was talented, and we were winning most of our games. I had a solid season and put up some decent numbers. As a result, I had two grants in aid offers, one from the local community college and, surprisingly to me, one from a Division II school up in North Carolina. The pro scouts that shadowed high school programs gave me a hard pass, but they were interested in our catcher and my pal, Stan Hoffman. I turned down the college offers. I would love to keep playing baseball, but I didn’t want to be within a mile of a classroom.

In mid-March the Sadie Hawkins dance rolled around and just like last year Cindi asked me to go with her. Cindi and I wore the same outfits from last year while Elaine and Ellen had on these righteous granny dresses, and black lace up boots. They had their hair in pigtails, and they had these cool fake buck teeth.

The Sadie Hawkins Dance was the anniversary of my first date with Cindi, so the twins left us alone to celebrate it. And celebrate we did as Cindi got naked and climbed in my lap while we were parked in the lot next to the main beach approach. Being small and limber made car sex with Cindi a worthwhile experience. My darkly tinted windows and heavy-duty suspension paid for themselves that night!

Elaine and Ellen celebrated their sixteenth birthday on the second Saturday of April. Cindi was at the country club party along with Nina and the usual assortment of cousins. Oh, and a bunch of our friends from school, including Karla Hernandez and her new boyfriend, Justin something or other. Amanda Pullman was there with Caroline of course. Elaine also invited some other classmates. They were some of the brainier kids, so I only knew a few of them. Mister Cavanaugh hired a Foreigner cover band that was most excellent. The highlight of my evening was when the twins dragged me out on the dance floor when Urgent blasted out of the speakers. They shimmied around me and sang along with the band. They whooped when the lyrics reached this section:

But I’m not looking for a love that’ll last
I know what I need and I need it fast
Yeah, there’s one thing in common that we both share
That’s a need for each other anytime, anywhere

Yep, the twins were now converts to 70’s and 80’s rock!

Elaine and Ellen were not as close to each other as they were two years ago, because they more fully developed their own personalities. Ellen was primmer and more proper. Elaine was more of a free spirit. Ellen was into math and science. Elaine was interested in medical research. Ellen seemed to lean towards other girls, while Elaine leaned the other way. I loved them both, but I could see Ellen eventually wanting something different. Elaine on the other hand, made no bones about us being together for the long term.

I took at least a hundred pictures at the party. Missus Cavanaugh asked me to, and when I agreed she hooked me up with a sweet little Cannon digital camera and a pocketful of memory cards for it. I stayed near the girls when they wanted me too, but still managed to wander around snapping away. Only a fully committed Japanese tourist could have taken took more pictures that evening. I took lots of pictures of the birthday girls and some of their friends and extended families. My favorite was a snap of Nina, Cindi and the Ellen standing in a group. They were all wearing pretty dresses and heels with their ankle bracelets prominently displayed. I hoped they never found out what the cartouche actually said.

The twins looked and acted very grown up at their party. They were about five-foot-eight now and weighted around one-thirty. They had medium sized breasts and very nice tushies. They had attractive regular features, including big blue eyes. I think they weren’t considered classically beautiful because of their unruly red hair and their bazillion freckles, but to me they were gorgeous inside and out. I felt the same way about Cindi. Strange how that works, eh?

We had to wait until after the noon Mass on Sunday before we could privately celebrate their milestone birthday. After Mass their parents left us alone in the house while they went to a Matinee showing of some play in Orlando. And you know what they say about mice when the cat’s away. I knew something was up when Ellen and Cindi tapped out after an hour. Their excuse was Ellen wanted to spend some of her birthday loot at the mall’s Saks Fifth Avenue store and Cindi was driving her there. After they left Elaine told me to stay put and she disappeared into the bathroom. I was fifteen minutes into a baseball game between the Yankees and Red Sox when Elaine returned, still gloriously naked. She turned off the TV and handed me a squeeze bottle.

“There is one more present I want, Johnny,” she said coyly.

I looked at the bottle, ‘Astroglide’, it read. I looked at Elaine in surprise.

“This seems like a gift for me,” I said.

“For us,” she corrected me, “We might only do this once, but I want the experience.”

Elaine, being Elaine, had researched the subject and prepared herself for the occasion. When we got down to the main event it happened without a lot of muss or fuss. Elaine was clean and lubed and, after astrogliding up old Kong we got down to it. Elaine insisted on us being face to face when we did the deed, so her long legs were dangling over my shoulder as I lined myself up. I was surprised at the relative ease in which I worked my way into my loves little butt. She only made me pause once before I bottomed out.

“You okay?” I asked when I was fully seated.

Elaine nodded, “I’ve been using a butt plug I borrowed from Aunt Nina.”

It was an adventure for both of us, and Elaine actually enjoyed it before we were through. While we were showering, we talked about the experience and decided it was fine for special occasions. All the preparation it required made it an event we had to plan. We also decided that we would keep what we did to ourselves. Elaine had kept getting ready for the event a secret from her sister and Cindi.

“This is something just for you and me. Okay, Johnny?” she explained.

I nodded my agreement.

“Just you and me, Baby,” I agreed.

The next day the twins weren’t in school because they were at the DMV getting their licenses. Mister and Missus Cavanaugh took them home from the DMV and gave them their last birthday present. In the driveway with a couple of ribbons on it was a two-year-old sporty black Lexus. They drove it to school, got a student parking permit, and went to class. They showed their new ride to me and Cindi after school. It was a very cool car but nothing flashy and they had to share it. It spoke volumes that the Cavanaughs didn’t flaunt their wealth.

Near the end of April, I bit the bullet and told my mother and grandparents about my decision to put off college and join the Army. Mom already had her suspicions about college, because I hadn’t applied to anywhere, and I wasn’t interested in the two partial athletic scholarships. She didn’t have a clue about the Army thing though, and she did not take that well at all.

“You are too young to join the Army,” she said.

“I can join at seventeen with parental consent,” I explained.

“Then that settles that,” she said, “because I’ll never sign any such thing.”

Only Dad’s rule about talking back to my mother kept me from arguing with her.