Chapter 5

If you’ve ever been driving down the street and seen a hooker, or someone you thought was a hooker, it’s a safe bet that the primary thing in your mind was “what she does” for a living. You might even get an image in your head of her acting sexually. It’s odd, in one sense, because that’s not what you think when you see people in other lines of work.

If you talk to the mechanic who is going to work on your car, for example, you don’t conjur up an image in your mind of him actually doing that. You just hope he’ll be successful. It’s the same with the sales clerk. He, or she, is just a person who you hope will help you find what you’re looking for. Think of just about anybody you run into during a normal day and it’s similar. Maybe you chat with these people, and take a brief, momentary interest in some facet of their lives. But what you don’t do, more than likely, is imagine them performing the work that they do.

It isn’t that way for someone in the sex trades. When you see that person, all you can think about is them ... in the performance of their ... duties.

That was Renee’s problem. Once she knew Bobby “had sex with women who paid him,” as she thought of it, that’s all she could imagine him doing, whenever she saw him.

When he came to her house, in response to her request to begin planning the renovations, she didn’t think of him tearing down walls, or building new ones. She didn’t imagine him painting, or laying carpet. She couldn’t visualize him setting a stool in place, or pulling electrical wiring.

All she could think about was him ... naked ... with women.

It would have driven her crazy, if he hadn’t convinced her to start the renovation right away. What helped even more was that he insisted that she do a lot of the work with him.

It took three weeks of working side by side, and of helping him tear down walls, build walls, being taught how to paint by him, and then helping him do that, before she began to think of him as Bobby the builder more often than she thought of him as Bobby the sex machine. He taught her how to finish woodwork, and how to run electrical wires, and do plumbing. She watched hands that built things, and began to think of them as capable hands, rather than just hands that had stroked women’s bodies.

They talked for hours, while they worked, about everything conceivable. He touched her and she touched him, in the process of building what was now the dream she could actually begin to see taking shape. They talked about things that made her laugh, and things that made her want to cry.

They were laying the last of the carpet when she had to take a bathroom break. She was sitting on the stool that she had helped install herself when the phone rang.

“Can you get that?” she yelled through the door.

“Sure,” came his reply.

She walked out to find him chatting amiably on the phone with whoever had called.

“Yes, she’s quite good at it, actually. I couldn’t have hired a better worker. She’s got an amazingly steady hand with a trim brush.”

He looked up at her.

“Here she is ... hang on.” He extended the phone. “It’s your mother,” he said calmly.

Renee felt frozen. This was a problem that had not been worked on, while she spent all her energy and mind on her dream. She took the phone and covered the microphone.

“You talked to her?” she gasped.

“You told me to answer it,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “She wanted to know who I was, and why I was answering the phone. I told her you were busy with the renovation, rather than telling her you were taking a leak.” He grinned. “Did I say the wrong thing?”

“She doesn’t know about the renovation!” hissed Renee.

“Oh,” said Bobby. “She does now.” He pointed at the phone. “She’s waiting to talk to you.”

Renee stared at the phone like it was a viper. She tried to calm herself and lifted it.

“Hi, Mommy,” she tried to say brightly.

“What in the world is going on there?” asked her obviously curious and somewhat distraught mother. “What was that man talking about?”

“We’re ... um ... renovating the house. I’m going to start a child care center here.”

“What?” asked her mother. “You’re going to tend other people’s brats?”

Renee felt the heat of anger surge through her. Her parents were a constant source of angst in her life.

“I’m going to use my education to earn a living, Mother,” she said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice.

“You don’t need to earn a living, Renee,” said her mother, authoritatively. “What is going on there? Where is Daniel? Why are you doing this, Renee?”

“Mother,” said Renee firmly. “With Daniel gone, I do need to make a living, and I did go to college to learn how to help children. There is nothing dishonorable about working for a living, Mother.”

“I’m coming down there!” declared her mother. “Something fishy is going on here, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it!”

“No, Mother,” said Renee, just as stubbornly. “You are not coming here!”

“I most certainly am!” shouted her mother.

“Don’t bother,” said Renee. “I’ll get a flight and be home tomorrow. Let’s just get this over with,” she said, her voice losing strength.

“Get what over with?” shouted her mother, so loudly that Bobby could hear it, standing three feet away from Renee.

“Some problems have developed,” said Renee, sounding defeated. “I’ll tell you about it when I get home.”

“You’ll tell me about it this instant!” yelled the woman.

“Goodbye, Mother,” said Renee, her voice now sounding agonized. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” –

“Don’t you hang up on me!“ screamed the woman on the other end of the line.

Renee did just that, and sat down hard in a chair nearby.

“Well, that tears it,” she said.

“You haven’t talked to them at all ... have you?” asked Bobby.

“No,” she sighed. “It just never seemed like the right time. I’ve been putting it off for weeks.”

“I thought I told you to talk to them,” he said.

“You did,” she said, listlessly.

The phone started ringing again. Renee didn’t move.

“You want me to get it?” he asked.

“What would you say?” she said listlessly.

“I’d tell her you were scampering naked through the house, packing to come home,” he said, grinning.

She actually cracked a smile. “That would serve her right,” she said, with a tiny giggle.

“Perhaps you should scamper around, packing to go home,” said Bobby. “Not naked, of course,” he added.

Renee looked up at him. Knowing what she now knew about him, she thought it was almost odd that he wasn’t flirting with her. It made her wonder, for a few seconds, if she wasn’t attractive, but then his comment about her cute butt fluttered in her mind.

He was just being a nice guy. The war within her mind about Bobby had faded, somewhat, as she worked next to him. It was hard for her to believe that he did all those things. The man she had seen was just a decent kind of guy. He never said anything unkind about anyone else, and he hadn’t made a single pass at her. Yet, she caught him looking at her, now and then, with appreciation in his eyes. She recognized that, without vanity. It was just there ... not pushy or lewd ... just his eyes complimenting her.

The phone finally stopped ringing.

“We’re so close to being done,” she said, ready to argue about leaving.

“You know you have to go,” he said.

“I know,” she admitted, sadly.

The phone started ringing again.

“Okay, I’ll go pack,” she said.

She left the room and Bobby picked up the phone.

“Hello?” he said, as if he hadn’t talked to the woman only moments before.

“I want my daughter on the phone right now!” said the woman.

“She’s packing,” said Bobby.

“Go get her,” said her mother.

“Ma’am,” he said, “with all due respect, your daughter is a grown woman, and when you try to treat her like she’s still your little girl, I don’t think it’s going to help your cause. She’ll be there tomorrow, and you can have a nice chat about things. Now, I have work to do, and it’s costing your daughter money, so I’m going to get back to work.”

“You’re impertinent!” barked Mrs. Harqart. “You have no business answering my daughter’s phone in the first place!”

“Well, then, I won’t do it again,” said Bobby, and he hung up.

He turned to see Renee, standing at the corner of the hallway, looking at him.

“Thanks,” she said. “But it won’t do any good.”

“She can’t live your life for you,” said Bobby. “Nobody can. You are the only one who can decide where your life is going to go. You are a grown woman, regardless of how you feel about it.”

“I don’t understand you,” she said, staring at him. “All those things you told me about ... what you do. They just don’t make any sense.”

“They don’t have anything to do with you,” said Bobby, “except that you’d have found out sooner or later, and I didn’t want you to be blind-sided, like you were with your husband.”

“You don’t seem like that kind of person,” she insisted.

“I’m just me,” said Bobby.

“Why did you say that it doesn’t have anything to do with me?” she asked.

He looked at her. “You have enough troubles already, without somebody like me chasing you around the dining room table.” He grinned.

“You’d do that?” she asked, her voice rising.

“Only if you ran,” he said, grinning more widely.

“You’re flirting with me again,” she accused.

“I thought you might need a little emotional lift, before you went off to see your Mamma.” He blew her a kiss, and then leaned over to pick up the knee kicker, to finish stretching the carpet.

Linda tried, in the beginning, to stay true to her husband. She felt a little guilty that their first child was going to be Bobby’s, but, after enduring two months without sex, she finally gave up and went back to having Bobby take care of the itch she couldn’t get rid of any other way.

She thought she was being clever, but she forgot about Suzie, and the fact that Suzie knew what Bobby had been doing with Linda late at night.

Suzie heard the creak of a board in the hallway and knew that it had to be Linda. She suspected Linda was going to Bobby’s room again. She didn’t understand that. She didn’t understand how Mary could have done it either. Linda had tried to explain it to her, but it hadn’t made sense. Oh, it was clear that Bobby wasn’t doing anything Linda didn’t want, but she couldn’t understand why Linda wanted that.

Ever since finding out, for sure, what was going on in Bobby’s room, Suzie had looked at boys with different eyes. She knew teenagers had sex, of course. Everybody knew that. She even had a pretty good idea of which teenagers she saw at school were doing that, but the whole concept of “having sex” just seemed foreign to her. She had never looked at a boy and even thought about having sex with him, much less wanted to do so.

Not until she found out some of her sisters were having sex with Bobby. And those other women. Lots of women seemed to want to have sex with him.

She had lain awake in bed at night, thinking about that. She wasn’t afraid of Bobby any more. She believed him when he said she was safe. She knew he loved her and wouldn’t hurt her. Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t let anyone else hurt her either, if he had his way about it. She knew she loved him too, but that was a misty kind of feeling that wafted in and out of her consciousness, without having real form. She loved her sisters too, but she didn’t want to have sex with them.

Linda’s explanation about it had been that it made her feel good and relaxed her. But she had Paul. Well, she had him before they broke up. But now she had him again. She was even married to him, and he had stayed in her room all night even! Except he wasn’t here now. He was back at college.

And Linda was sneaking to Bobby’s room ... just like before.

She sat up, listening. The creak was gone. She could go to the bathroom ... just to see if anybody was in the hall.

She stepped out into the hallway and stepped on the same creaky board that someone else had. Nothing happened though. Nobody stuck a head out of a door, to see who was there in the hallway.

She stepped quickly to the bathroom, which was dark, with the door open. She strained to listen, not knowing what she was listening for. Some errant noise, not quite identifiable, came from the direction of Bobby’s room.

She tiptoed down there and paused, listening.

Voices. She heard quiet voices inside. Someone was in there with him ... and they were talking.

Curiosity bloomed in her, wanting to be satisfied. She couldn’t just open the door. The last time she’d done that, she’d found Linda sitting on Bobby’s lap, with her panties on the floor beside them. It had been terribly embarrassing to her, though she had tried hard not to show it.

She thought of the trees around the house ... trees she had climbed hundreds of times in years gone by. She concentrated, trying to remember if there was one outside Bobby’s window.

Yes. A big sycamore, with lots of level, horizontal branches.

She scurried back to her room, mindless now of the creaks her feet caused in the floorboards of the hallway. She pulled on a thick, sheepskin jacket, then levered her feet into tennis shoes, without socks, and without untying them. Her legs she left covered with only her nightgown, so she’d have freedom of movement.

She tried to get down the hallway without making too much noise, and then down the steps. Going to the back door, off the kitchen, she eased it open and then jumped down all three steps, to the cold ground below. Running around the house, she didn’t pay attention to the bite in the air, concentrating only on which tree would give her access to Bobby’s window. Looking up, she thought it was odd that she had to figure out which window was his. She’d never thought about that before. It was easy though. His was the only window with light coming out of it.

She climbed easily and confidently, her tomboy muscles working like they always had, pulling her up, higher and higher. There were two branches level with his window, one above the other, which let her walk out on the lower one, while holding on to the upper. She had to lean, but as she did so, Bobby’s bed came into view.

She sucked in breath and held it, unprepared for what she saw.

Linda wasn’t sitting on his lap. She was lying down on his bed, and he was hovering over her, with his head above her loins.

Both of them were naked ... buck naked ... and her legs were spread ... right in front of his face.

Suzie watched, numbly, as his head lowered. She saw his tongue come out, and knew, instinctively, that he was going to touch her sister with it. When he did, her breath, held for many seconds, rushed out of her lungs, and she dragged cold air in harshly as she watched Bobby lick Linda’s pussy.

There was no shred of doubt that that was what he was doing. Even though his face pressed to Linda’s flesh, and Suzie could no longer see his tongue, she knew what it was doing. There was also no shred of doubt that Linda loved it. Her hands went to Bobby’s head, and gripped his hair first; then let go and played with it, urging him on.

Everything about it looked strange to Suzie. She’d seen her brother a thousand times, but never stark naked, and never on his knees, with his pale butt sticking up in the air. In one sense, it didn’t look like him at all. She’d seen Linda a thousand times too ... naked even ... but not like this. Not with this look in her eyes as she lifted her head and looked at the top of Bobby’s bobbing head. That look ... the look on her sister’s face ... made her look like a stranger too.

The bed was right inside the window. They were only four feet away. Suzie didn’t worry about them seeing her, but that was handled on a subconscious basis. Her brain remembered trying to see out her own window at night, with a light on, and how hard that was to do. The glass separated them from her, but even so, she could hear, vaguely, the sounds from inside. There was Linda’s voice, low, moaning, appreciative ... and wet, slurping sounds ... very faint, but still audible.

When Bobby suddenly lurched upward, Suzie leaned back automatically, but he paid no attention to anything outside the room. He stood on his knees, and something straight and thick stuck out from his groin. Suzie held her breath again, realizing it was his penis.