Part 4

Having two personal problem to stew over and more than the usual amount of homework Wednesday night, Shannon found when she reached the Pollocks' that Kyle -- normally a low-maintenance fifth grader -- hadn't been turning in his homework. Instead of burying himself in his room, he had to sit across the kitchen table from her and show her his homework as he completed each assignment. Kyle's reaction could have been have predicted; he found ten times as many things to distract him, and her, as any adult could possibly have found. Half his homework was still undone when his bedtime arrived.

She was rather frazzled when Steve appeared. More than that, this Kyle was a different boy; she no longer trusted him to sleep through the night. The house was a "ranch," and the door to Kyle's room was not six feet from the living room. When their books were spread out, she led Steve into the kitchen before giving him a welcoming kiss.

"What is this?" he asked.

"As much privacy as we are going to get. I'm nervous."

"Where is a glass?"

"Here." She got him one. He ran the water, filled the glass, poured half out.

"Now," he said, "we have a reason to be in here." He had a wad of tissues in his coat pocket just in case she would repeat her delightful strokes. That possibility was looking dimmer.

"You have a devious mind. I like that in a guy."

When they kissed again, she began to relax in his arms. He felt her breasts press into his chest. He left her mouth to sprinkle kisses over her face, but the differences in height made that uncomfortable. He stopped on her forehead while pulling her sweatshirt out of her skirt. He raised it enough to reach her bra clasp.

He liked the next kiss better, with her breasts a little softer and an inch lower on his chest. Even through her sweatshirt and his clothes, he could feel the hardness of her nipples.

Shannon never mentioned the annoyance of a bunched-up bra. The alternative was obvious, and she didn't want to remove her bra here. The kiss was great, though, and there was always something sexy about having her breasts swinging free.

Steve hunched down, hugged Shannon to him, straightened up, and set her on the edge of the countertop. After a little adjustment, he was standing between her legs, and her face was above his. They kissed again, his tongue playing in her mouth. He ran his hands under her shirt, up her back, and then around to cup her breasts. All that smoothness was against his palms; his thumbs played with her nipples.

Somehow, the different angle made the kiss different for Shannon. She had her arms about Steve and her face above his; his hands were busy at her breasts but not holding her to him. She was kissing him rather than his kissing her. At that thought, she broke the main kiss to kiss his nose and forehead as he sometimes did for her. When she returned to his mouth, she invaded it with her tongue. She felt daring, as well as turned on.

Steve's mind was concentrating on keeping his hands gentle on Shannon's breasts. It couldn't handle her tongue in his mouth. His body, with no such limits, arched forward rubbing his hardness along her belly. Luckily, their clothing interfered.

Shannon had felt his erection pressing against her many times at dances, but usually closer to her rib cage than to her groin. Indeed, those experiences usually marked the less erotic parts of their evenings; and she'd always thought of the male reaction as slightly humorous.

This time there was nothing funny about it. This time Steve was pressed against her mound, an inch from their having real sex; and it turned her almost all the way on. When she curled her legs around him and hugged him to her body with all four limbs, the action was only partly motivated by her realization that they couldn't go further while pressed together. Mostly it was instinctive acceptance of her mate.

Somehow Steve realized through his fog of lust that Shannon's lovely breasts were being crushed by this position. He dropped his hands from them and hugged her. His left hand pulled her hips towards him while his right petted compulsively up and down her back.

They had to breathe, and eased back. When Steve put his hand on Shannon's knee, she loosened her legs. His stroke up the inside of her thigh tightened them again. "I'm not trying to stop you," she said.

"That's okay." He reached between them to caress her mound. They kissed again, but his fingers couldn't quite reach where he wanted them. Which was where she wanted them, too.

"Did you mean what you said about knowing that there were things that you can't have?" she asked.

"I guess so. What did I say?"

"I'm going to wear white on my wedding day. Do you know what that means?"

"You mean that you are going to be a virgin then."

"Will you respect that limit?"

"Of course, Shannon. What do you think I am?"

She thought he was a male, a teenage male at that. But she didn't have quite the words to express that. "Bring that chair over here so it faces this way. Then sit on it."

He wondered what he had done, but he obeyed her direction. She hopped down and walked over to him. She sat on his lap straddling him, careful that she wasn't sitting on any part of her skirt. "Are you comfortable this way?"

He shifted until her weight was balanced. "I'm okay." More than okay, the discomfort of her weight hardly compared to his delight in her accessibility.

"Don't lift my top. I don't want Kyle coming out and seeing me." That sounded more limiting than she had intended. She took his hand and put it under the sweatshirt.

Steve couldn't kiss her breasts like this, but it was Shannon's call. Besides, she knew the kids; he had to trust her judgment on that. Her breasts were delightful, but he began stroking her thigh after a minute. She made no move to stop him.

Shannon was actually enjoying this less than she had the kiss on the countertop. She'd jumped down, after all, so that he could touch her between her legs. Finally he did, stroking so softly that it tickled. Even the tickle was arousing, and his tongue was delightful in her mouth.

Steve was trying to figure out Shannon's shape through the layers of cloth. He'd seen diagrams in sex-ed books and pictures in the raunchier magazines; but all he'd seen of Shannon was the mound, and that only once. His curiosity didn't mean that he wasn't enjoying the feel, of course. He was also enjoying her response. She was breathing into his mouth, and he could gauge every increase in her excitement by the raggedness of her breath. Her hand was on the back of his neck, controlling the firmness of the kiss. As she would press her mouth more firmly into his, he would press more firmly with his fingers.

Shannon didn't want to break this off, but her breast was starting to feel sore. She grabbed Steve's arm through her shirt and switched it to her left breast. "More gently," she said.

He felt guilty. He knew that he should move from one of her breasts to the other. He touched her much more gently, above and below. Shannon broke the kiss and touched the arm that he had thrust between her legs. "Less gently," she said. Then she had to wait for Steve to stop laughing.

Soon, however, he was again brushing her nipple very gently. Soon he was stroking her lips quite firmly through her panties. Soon she, kissing him, feeling all of these sensations, started on her journey.

Steve could feel more dampness through the cloth. That must have made his detection of her shape easier, because her lips felt as if they had become larger. The confinement of his jeans was becoming a torture, but he could bear that torture for the rewards his hands and mouth were receiving. Shannon pressed harder against his mouth and breathed more rapidly.

She was soaring. He was taking her as high as she had ever taken herself. Then she shattered with a gasp. Unable to support her own weight, she slumped in his arms.

Steve felt her gasp into him. Then he had to abandon his stroking to keep her from falling. She gasped an inch from his ear for what seemed like a really long time. Maybe it was merely that his foot had fallen asleep. Anyway, he figured that an armful of Shannon was worth a little discomfort.

Finally, she gathered herself together and stood up. She was not quite steady on her feet, but better than Steve. He didn't even attempt to rise for another few minutes. He was on his feet, and considering whether to mention the Kleenex he had brought for his own relief, when the garage door opened. It made an unholy racket, startling them into action. Shannon fixed her bra immediately; Steve headed for the other room. His coat would hide his erection.

Mr. Pollock didn't seem to be in a very good mood when he came in, especially considering how much liquor he had obviously consumed. He paid Shannon, though, and accepted Steve's offer to drive her home. Steve would have worried with Mr. Pollock at the wheel. Steve thought about the Kleenex again on the short drive, but there wasn't really anywhere to park. Shannon stopped him a block from her house to give him a big kiss. He dropped her off at her door, drove home, marked the mileage and gas level, and went upstairs.

In his room, he savored his memory and the odor still on his fingers. He felt too sleepy, though, to linger on his road to completion. He still had the sticky Kleenex in bed with him when he awoke the next morning.

"Tell me, Shannon," Ken asked her Tuesday morning in school, "do you think the ball for Valentine's Day should have more slow dances or more fast dances?"

"Valentine's Day? Definitely more slow dances." For that matter, Steve and she sat out half the fast dances these days.

"Well, you know, if you were on the committee for that dance, you could represent that view."

She laughed. Ken might play the fool, but he wasn't one. "Why don't you ask Steve to be on the committee?"

"I plan to," he said. "I thought that he'd be likelier to agree if you already had."

"I hadn't thought about us both being on a committee together."

"Do think about it," he said. "Frankly, there are places where I wouldn't want a pair of lovebirds like you. Get twice the attention to the subject from one of the couple than from both. But this dance is about romance, and my ideas aren't going to be sufficient."

"I'll think about it." She would also think about a new view of Ken. Student council was enough of a joke that having the class prankster as president had made a twisted kind of sense, but it had functioned under Ken as well as it had the previous three years. And the themes for the balls had been somewhat more original.

English, her only class with Steve, was already over for the day; but she mentioned Ken's question at lunch.

"We're both awfully busy," Steve said. "And we'd have to help decorate on a Saturday morning. I work then."

"Well, neither of us has been what you'd call active in extra-curricular activities, your chess club excepted. This might be sort of fun. 'What did you do in high school, Mommy?' 'I babysat, dear.' That doesn't sound like much."

The concept of Shannon with her children distracted Steve. Would they be his children? "You decide. If you want it, we can." He'd worked extra time for Hauksbee to cover for others; he'd dropped the chess club because too many of their matches were on Saturday mornings. The old man would let him off for one day. "Tell me what you decide."

Their conversation veered in other directions, and the subject had entirely slipped Steve's mind by the time he walked into calculus class.

It hadn't slipped Ken's mind. "You know, Steve," he said. "The ball for Valentine's Day is coming up. I talked to Shannon about having the two of you on the committee. Frankly, when I think of romance, you and Shannon spring to mind. The school has a lot of more demonstrative couples, but I don't think that their idea of romance would fly by the administration."

"She told me."

"What do you think?"

"It's her decision."

"For both of you?" Ken raised an eyebrow.

"You sure aren't going to get me on the committee without her."

Ken didn't get to Shannon before the end of the day; he had other people to ask as well. The first thing he did was to raise her left hand for an ostentatious examination. "Steve said that you are going to decide for the two of you," he explained. "I thought that I should check for a wedding ring."

"It's not like you think." Though she didn't mind the suggestion that it was. "He said I could decide this for the two of us."

"And have you? We could really use your input. The two of you come to the dances, so you must know what you've enjoyed and not enjoyed. You show brains in class, which many on the planning teams don't, quite frankly. Some of them have brains, but shut them down for class; even so..."

"I think Steve was just tired of your bull. If I decide, you won't bother him. I haven't decided yet."

"You won't be disappointed if you decide to do it," Ken said. Since she had no particular expectations, the promise was more certain than Ken probably had intended.

Steve was still taking the bus; the weather -- while clear -- had been windy and bitterly cold. This afternoon, however, was still and only a degree or two below freezing. You could almost see the piles of snow receding from the center of the sidewalks while you watched.

On the walk home, she could stroll and think about deciding for Steve. She had previously thought of marrying Steve, from picturing him in a tux waiting for her at the end of the aisle, to imagining a honeymoon with him, to considering what their kids might look like.

She hadn't thought about couples sharing decisions; indeed, for the last four years she had been anxious to get out of her house and make her own decisions. But her parents shared decisions, especially about her. She had a pretty good idea about the fault lines, but seldom could use that knowledge. The last time her dad had spanked her, it was because she'd gone to a horror movie with his permission after her mother had refused hers. "You don't have permission," he'd told her, "when you cheat to get it." But, she had figured out even then, he wouldn't have spanked her for sneaking out. Trying to play one parent off against the other raised the penalties.

The past few months, however, Steve and she had been sharing a lot of decisions. School was most important. But was it really? Several times, Steve had backed off because she wouldn't pet when he expected her to. Was that sharing a decision? Maybe it was just his realization of her body belonging to her, and he didn't have a right to vote on what he did with it. Even in the meadow, when he had gone way over the line, he had let her end it when she wanted to.

And, if it was her body and her decision, where did breaking in on him in the bathroom fit? It had been his body then. He'd tried to hide, and she hadn't let him.

She was thinking so hard that she almost walked into Mr. Markham from two doors down. "My! Shannon," he said, "you were really concentrating there. What do you have to bother your pretty head about, a pretty young girl like you?"

Her face flamed. "I'm really sorry I wasn't watching where I was going." She ducked away before he could repeat his question.

Her mother was off showing a series of houses to demanding clients and not due back for hours. She'd left detailed instructions for dinner, and Shannon started in on them immediately. Half an hour later, her mother walked in saying, "They made an offer on the first house. Now we have to see whether the seller will come down."

"Want me to finish?" Shannon asked. If she did, she didn't have to do dishes.

"Let's work together. We'll shove the dishes off on Dad."

So they cooked together, her mother actually taking the helper role when the jobs divided that way. The good feelings lasted through dinner, which was dominated by her mother's blow-by-blow account of getting the clients to see the advantages of the house she had been showing.

Allison Bryant broke out the mint chocolate chip ice cream she had bought to celebrate. Next year, they'd be celebrating her sales and Wayne's raise with wine again. But she'd rather have her daughter with her and stick to ice cream. For that matter, they let Shannon drink when she was home. Better learn moderation at home than taste her first booze in the company of boozing fellow adolescents.

"Do you have a job tonight, Shannon?" she asked.

"No. Not even a date. I need to get on top of 'Romeo and Juliet.'" And Steve needed that more, although she didn't want him getting on top of Juliet. She felt her smile, and was briefly afraid her mother would see it.

"I was just thinking," Mrs. Bryant continued. "Your father and I used to celebrate my sales with wine. The ice cream was to include little Shannon in the celebration."

"Gee thanks, Mom." The response was perfunctory. She knew her mother only currently used the term to describe her in earlier times. Still, it was worth some response to remind her she shouldn't.

"So. Should I have bought wine for the three of us instead?"

Well, Shannon appreciated the offer. On the other hand, it was a big bowl of ice cream, and her mother usually poured Shannon half a glass of wine -- sour wine, to boot.

Wayne Bryant didn't like the idea at all. He remembered the wine less as celebration than as getting Allison in the mood for the real celebration. He could pour his own glass of Maker's Mark when he chose, but his diet didn't allow for ice cream unless Allison made the exceptions. He looked longingly at the bowl of ice cream until inspiration led him to the liquor cabinet in the living room.

He came back to the table with a bottle of creme de menthe. He poured a little on Shannon's ice cream, more on his own, and passed the bottle to Allison. She took very little.

"This is good!" Shannon said. If she had known that her parents had this stuff, she'd never have sampled her father's whiskey back when she was in eighth grade. Of course, if she'd sneaked samples of this stuff, she might not have stopped so soon.

They tasted chocolate, and mint, and a small celebration. They tasted the good feelings of being in a family. "Really," said Mrs. Bryant, "we're going to miss you next year, Shannon."

"I'm going to miss you, too, Mom. Miss both of you." And she knew that this was true, crazy as they drove her sometimes.

"We know you have to grow up and leave," Mrs. Bryant continued. "By the way, have you sent your acceptance in yet?"

"No, Mom. I haven't even decided where I'm going to send the acceptance yet. I have until May first, and there are good reasons to wait till nearly then."

"I can't believe that you are considering going to the U of I when Albion has accepted you."

Wayne Bryant sighed for the feeling of togetherness which had lasted so briefly. Maybe he could lighten the conversation. "Well some people choose their schools for the faculty; some for the student body."

"If Steven felt as strongly as she does about being together, he would go to Albion." The two of them were going on fewer dates; Shannon had stopped campaigning for a later curfew. Allison could see that the first intensity was wearing off; why couldn't her daughter. She turned towards Shannon. "Maybe he's right; maybe it's time for you two to give each other a little space."

Shannon stared at her mother. Steve had never asked for "a little space." A little privacy for immediate relief was the maximum he'd wanted. He'd never said that he wouldn't go to Albion, though he had never said that he would, either. The point that her mother couldn't see is that asking Steve to change colleges for her was promising to marry him. It was worse than accepting an engagement ring. Break an engagement, and he had a ring that another girl might not want; her mother wanted her to ask Steve to accept a life that he did not want in order to be with her.

And, of course, if they did marry, she wanted Steve to be well prepared for his profession. They would get more money, and Steve would be happier. He wanted to be a good chemical engineer, maybe a good chemist.

"You know, Mom," she said, "if I had to choose today between a future in which I certainly will marry Steve, and a future in which I certainly won't, I'd choose the future including Steve. Just so you know what the choice is, if you make me choose."

Allison couldn't guess what had brought that on. The last thing that she wanted was to make Shannon choose so young. The problem with Shannon's fixation on Steven at seventeen was seventeen not Steven. She knew that Shannon would never admit it, but it was her happiness they worried about. Steven was great from a parental viewpoint -- sober, hardworking, reasonably clean cut. It wasn't as if he wanted to play baseball professionally or even go to medical school; chemists were paid well, but anybody who took the classes could get the work.

She would love to see them give each other a little space for four years. If Shannon still wanted Steven after seeing a college full of boys, God bless her. And if Steven's eyes wandered, better before marriage than after.

"Well, Chick," Wayne said. "I think you should consider what your mother is saying. But this is your decision. If the school will take you and we can possibly afford it, we'll send you off and pay the tuition." Which was, he figured, the minimal expression of what he and Allison had decided years ago.

They continued eating their ice cream as separately as three people can at the same table. Strangers thrown together by restaurant crowding would have related more closely. Shannon went upstairs to do her studying; her parents stayed behind.

Wayne suddenly remembered what Shannon was going to read. "'Romeo and Juliet'! Why can't the school system teach them The Story of O? She'll be planning an elopement within the hour."

His wife wasn't amused. "It's generous of you to promise her the college fund that I earned."

"As opposed to the money which bought this ice cream? And this house, and the gas you put in your Taurus to take your clients around, for that matter. That's all our money, the money that I earned. Look, we agreed that your commissions would go into college bonds for Shannon; we didn't agree that they would go into a fund which you could use to blackmail her."

"First she tells me that I am forcing her to marry Steven, and then you tell me that I am blackmailing her."

"No," he admitted, "you are not. If she sent a rejection letter to Albion and an acceptance to U of I, you would agree to her decision. But you can't have it both ways. If telling her that fact is a betrayal, then you want to use that money to persuade her to accept your school choice."

"I still don't see why they couldn't both go to Albion. Do you?"

"Yes." He figured that, if Allison wanted to hide from the truth, she shouldn't ask point-blank questions. "If you want to do something, something particular, you prepare as best you can to do that thing. You don't buy the generic-brand education and pretend that it is as good as the custom model. And employers know that. Go to the personnel department of a chemical firm and say, 'I have a good, well-rounded, education; I want to be a chemist.' They'll ask you, 'Then why didn't you get the best preparation to be a chemist?' And the best preparation is not in a small school with no great interest in the natural sciences."

He could distinguish among her tears, even from her back. They had been married more than two decades, for God's sake. The tears she took from the table were those of anger. He finished her bowl of ice cream before stacking the dishes in the dishwasher. He figured that he deserved the treat; he wasn't going to get any other pleasure that night.

Shannon did the minimum necessary on her other homework before opening "Romeo and Juliet." She wished she could look up the notes in the big copy of Folger's Shakespeare that her parents kept downstairs, but she didn't want it badly enough to return to the front lines. The language was such a trap, both in its beauty and in its strangeness, that she'd read passages without noticing what was happening. This time, she put a list of the parts of each scene down on paper, then she listed what she knew because of that section. The flow of the play started to become clearer.

Midway through this exercise, she got a call from Mrs. Jensen. They wanted her for Tuesday a week from then. She checked her calendar and agreed. While she was downstairs, she did get the Folger's and lug it upstairs.

Apparently families had always resented their daughters' falling in love. The Capulets, at least, had some excuse. The only thing that her parents had against Steve was that she loved him. And, for her mother, that he might interfere with Shannon's going to Albion. She should send an acceptance to the U of I tomorrow; that would show Mom!

The problem was that she didn't want to go there without Steve. And Steve might get into IIT. Would he go to IIT without her? Should he go to IIT without her, if it were her decision to make?

Well, he shouldn't because that would tear them apart. But a degree from IIT might produce a greater income for him for their entire lives together. And would their lives be together?

At this point, Shannon realized that she was done studying for that night. She got into her night clothes and into bed to do her worrying in comfort.

Albion was not that much farther from Chicago than Champaign was. Either distance would require an overnight stay to make a visit worthwhile. With any luck at all, IIT would turn Steve down; but she felt like a dog for even thinking that. She added a quick mental note to God that she had not asked for that. If they accepted Steve, the same conditions applied as the ones on Albion which anyone but her mother could see. If Steve turned down his best chance at education to be with her, she owed him permanence. (If he wanted it; he hadn't quite said that he did.)

Ken had thought that putting them both on his piddling committee needed a wedding ring. Now she was making decisions for both of them for their entire future. Assuming that Steve would go along, and she had to assume that for these decisions. She could sure see being married to Steve. What she'd told her mom was perfectly true. But she didn't want to make that decision tonight, and it was likely that Steve didn't either.

And was it fair for her to decide in ways that she would resent Steve's doing? What if Steve had broken into a bathroom knowing that she was there? Of course, he was really in that house under her invitation; but that didn't work. She'd have screamed if he'd interrupted her in a bathroom in his own house. And that didn't even take into account what she'd known he was doing.

Somehow, it was different; but she couldn't say how. Steve might well disagree with her on the difference, and it would be fair if he did.

They could wait for the next step until she was ready; it was still her body. Steve could decide to go to school where they couldn't be together; it was still his future. She didn't want to put the same demands on him that her mother was putting on her. She would even give him one more chance to back off before she put them on the dance committee.

And she would apologize for breaking in on him and holding him there without his permission. That, however, led to her memory of the sensations when she did that holding. It had been hot and firm, it had jumped in her hand when the stuff had spurted out.

That, she realized, was how it would act inside her. It would not only penetrate her, it would jerk in her depths as it had jerked in her hand. Somehow, the thought was very sexy. Her nipples were suddenly hard, and she stroked them. After she moved her right hand between her legs, when her tension was building, she remembered the moment. Something inside her, where that pulsing would be some day, pulsed in sympathy with it as her time came. Her mind was still struggling with putting all these sensations together as she curled up to sleep, but she didn't worry much about that. Her body seemed ready enough.

She caught Steve when they were leaving English the next morning. "We have to talk," she said.

"Here?" He turned in her direction. Her next class was clear over on the other side of the building. Usually, she was the one who didn't want to talk that time of the day.

"No. We need to talk at some length. But one thing. Do you mind if I sign us both up for Ken's dance committee?"

"Go ahead. I said that. But I didn't drive today." Which meant that he couldn't drive her home. His mother, who was the office worker for a suite of dentists, worked Saturdays but not Wednesdays. Sometimes Steve took the car.

"I'm sitting for Mrs. Green tonight. Come over after work."

That was news worth slipping half a minute late into physics class. All that earned him was a glare from Mr. Babaian and the next question. He had to fumble with his notes, but his answer was correct.