Chapter 8

The routine of classes calmed her down. Her interaction with Mr. Hornsby, on the musical, had made her a little less of a mystery to him, and she had been so happy that he was doing his part that her expected bitchiness had never really surfaced. That led to a very subtle change in the way she was treated in the teacher’s lounge, because practically everyone had asked him what the dragon lady was like, and all had been told the same thing: “Not all that bad, actually. She’s trying hard.”

In reality, the only real change was that other teachers gave her a small smile now, instead of a blank face, and a few nodded as they passed her in a hallway or the lounge. Just that small change made the day more pleasant for all of them, though.

Then, after school, when she saw that one whole flat was completely painted and ready for the show, she felt even better.

Her feeling of progress and good will, however, vanished as she saw Bobby saunter into the auditorium. Most of the kids called out to him and he stopped to talk to a small cluster of them. She was discomfited by his mere appearance in the auditorium. She had assumed that after being run off from her house, he wouldn’t show up here either. Had she heard the actual conversation going on she would have been furious.

“Hey, Mister D,” said Tiffany. “How they hangin’?”

“Low and slow, Tiff,” said Bobby. He was trying to learn the lingo these kids spoke. He wasn’t always sure he was saying the right thing, but when he messed up the kids usually just laughed and had a good time with it.

“Where were you last night?” asked a boy named Jeremiah. “We got the storefront set done. It’s so bad, I’m freakin’ out about it.”

“I had something else to do,” said Bobby. “How’s Mizz Bradford today? She seem upset about anything?”

“She’s cool,” said Linda Tarmigan. “She hasn’t been trippin’ or giving people the hairy eyeball or anything.”

“Good,” sighed Bobby. “We had a little argument last night and I was hoping she didn’t take it out on you guys.”

“Ooooo,” said Tiffany, looking excited. “Are you sniffing around her now, Mister D?”

“Not hardly,” laughed Bobby. “Not my type.”

“Yeah,” said Jeremiah. “She’s foxy, but she ain’t with it, you know?”

“I know,” said Bobby, grinning. “I’d better get on down there and get to work.”

“Cool,” said Jeremiah. “Check you later.”

Bobby went on to the stage. Erica was waiting for him there.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice cold.

“I was going to work on sets,” he said, looking at her warily.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Okay.”

She took him outside the double stage doors at the back of the stage. It was cool outside and she crossed her arms under her breasts. It only put them on display, but she didn’t think about that. The cool air also activated her nipples. Bobby was aware of all this in his peripheral vision, but didn’t look there.

“Why did you touch me like that last night?” she asked bluntly.

“It was either that or slap you,” he said calmly. “I elected for that.”

“You thought about slapping me?” Her voice went up a notch.

“Erica, you were freaking out. You weren’t any good to him that way. He’s depending on you now, and that started last night, whether you were ready or not. I had to get your attention. It worked ... didn’t it?”

“That will never happen again,” she said stridently. “Do not touch me again. Do we understand each other?”

“I understand you,” he said. “I don’t think you understand me, but that’s not really important.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, still spoiling for a fight. “What don’t I understand about you?”

“Look,” he said. “We’re getting along okay. Let’s just leave it at that. We’ve got work to do inside, and while I don’t mind having this conversation, the work inside isn’t getting done.”

“They got a lot done last night, and we weren’t here then,” objected Erica.

“Do you want me to stay or leave?” he asked. “Just tell me which one. It makes no difference to me.”

Erica felt a stab of rejection, and shook it off. She had put him in his place. There would be no more ... trouble. The practical part of her knew she needed him here.

“Stay,” she said.

He turned around and went into the building, leaving her outside alone.

Erica didn’t know what to do. The rest of the evening had gone so routinely, after she ... corrected Bobby ... that it had almost seemed like nothing had happened. Then, when she got home, she saw that Bobby had apparently spent more time on the ramp, because it was much further along.

Will was awake and in good spirits. She’d been a little worried that he’d get bored, with nothing to do all day. It turned out he had gone out and sat on the porch and talked to Bobby while he worked.

“I don’t know why you don’t like him,” Will said, as they ate a late supper together. “Of all the people I’ve met since I went into the hospital, he seems the most genuine to me.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” said Erica. The fact was, she didn’t have a good reason for not liking Bobby Dalton. Except that he was a man ... and had touched her breasts.

“Why?” asked Will. “Why should we talk about something else? You finally meet a decent kind of guy and you shove him away. When are you going to wise up, sis?”

“Let’s not go into this again,” sighed Erica. “I’ve done fine while you were gone. I’m perfectly capable of being successful without a man to try and take the credit for it. I don’t need a man to succeed in life.”

“Okay,” said her brother, “but I can think of one way you’d be a lot happier, and it kind of requires a member of the opposite sex.” The right side of his face smiled. It looked ghastly, because the left side stayed rigidly calm.

“The last place in the world I need to get information like that from is my baby brother,” she said.

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said. “I lost my virginity in high school, and then when I joined the Army ... well all that stuff they say about women liking a man in uniform ... it’s true.” He stared at her. “Unless I’ve lost all ability to figure things out, I bet you’re still a virgin, Erica.”

She blushed. “If you think I’m going to discuss the status of my hymen with my little brother, you’re sadly mistaken,” she said uncomfortably.

“I’m not a baby any more, Sis,” he said softly. “And you’re getting older too. Don’t throw your life away because you bought in to some frustrated woman’s idea that the world would be better off without men in it.”

“It’s not like that, Billy!” she said. She stopped. “Will,” she corrected. “I’m still not used to calling you that. But the point isn’t that I want all men to disappear. I just want to be able to be everything that I can be, and not have to beg a man to do it.”

“I get it,” said Will. “Maybe you should join the Army. I met lots of women in the Army who are doing the same things as men, and getting paid the same too.”

“I don’t think so,” said Erica. “Look what the Army did to you.”

“Bad luck,” said Will shortly. “That’s all.”

They had let it lie there. They had watched TV together for a while, and he fell asleep in his chair. She didn’t know whether to wake him up and tell him to go to bed or not. He’d be more comfortable in bed. It occurred to her that he might not be comfortable anywhere. He still took pain medicine, though he didn’t talk about what kind of pain he was in.

She couldn’t just leave him there, though. She needed to get to bed herself, though she wasn’t looking forward to that. The thoughts she couldn’t seem to keep out of her head, lately, were disturbing.

She sighed and decided to take a shower before she woke him up.

Erica got out of the shower and dried off. Her reflection in the mirror caught her eye. Her breasts till looked bloated and huge, of course. She wished there was a way to have about half of them removed. The rest of her looked more or less normal, at least in her own opinion. She shivered as the moisture evaporated off her skin, and watched as her nipples elongated and tingled. The urge to squeeze them was almost physical, but she resisted it. She shrugged into her bathrobe and ran a comb through her hair. Keeping it in a shag made it easy to take care of. She didn’t spend hours on it, like a lot of other women. She didn’t care if men were impressed, and she certainly didn’t want to encourage them to look at her.

Will was still slumped in his chair, snoring slightly, when she went to get him. She pushed him to his room and shook his shoulder.

“Time to go to bed,” she said softly.

He jerked awake and his whole body went tense, staying that way for a few seconds and then slowly relaxing.

“Okay,” he mumbled.

“You want me to help you get undressed?”

“No,” he said. “That’s the last thing I need right now.”

Erica stood up. That seemed like an odd kind of thing to say. He leaned forward, gripping the arm of the chair with his right hand, and lifting his left arm to point it down in that curious way that put the stump of his wrist on the left armrest. She winced as he pushed and stood to hop in short little jumps, not really going anywhere, but just keeping his balance. His body turned and he sat on the edge of the bed. His brown eyes surveyed her.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

Erica blushed. There was only one thing he could be talking about, and that was her walking in on him while he masturbated.

“I should have knocked,” she said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“Oh, you didn’t embarrass me,” he said.

She looked surprised.

“There was a nurse ... while I was in the burn unit,” he said. “She sat and talked to me. They assigned nurses to do that sometimes, if they thought the patient was suicidal. It was supposed to make us feel like they cared about us, and that it didn’t matter that we were grotesque to look at. She felt sorry for me. Anyway, one night we got to talking about my old girlfriends and her old boyfriends, and she ended up jerking me off. It got to be a kind of going to bed ritual for us. She even found another nurse to take over for her when she got reassigned.”

Erica couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her little brother being... serviced ... by women?! She wanted to be outraged, but the image of a man - it wasn’t Will ... it was just a faceless man - all bandaged up and helpless, stuck in a strange place and in pain, was firmly in her head. And the woman bent over that man, using her hand to please him, wasn’t some sexual slave. She was simply making him feel a little better, in very difficult circumstances. She couldn’t see it any differently in her mind. Had someone told her a story like that before Will came home, she was quite sure she would have been outraged that a woman would debase herself like that. But, seeing Will, and hearing about his horrible return from the gates of death, enabled her to see that woman in a completely different light.

“It was about the only thing about the hospital that was good,” said Will. “I really miss it.”

There was another twist in the fabric of reality as he spoke those words. It was almost as if Erica was outside of her body, floating in the air, looking interestedly on, to see what her body would do. The floating Erica heard a man saying “I really miss a woman servicing me,” and knew what her body should do. Her body should stiffen and she should deliver a lecture about how men objectified women, reducing them to a vagina, or in this case, a hand, that was destined to please the man. That was wrong! It enslaved women!

The floating Erica, though, was surprised at what the mind in her body did. That mind heard those words delivered in a wistful, yearning kind of way that really said, “I miss the closeness those women shared with me, when they could have walked away and left me alone and frustrated.”

She blinked. What was she doing? There was no “closeness” involved when a woman masturbated a man. That was foolishness. It was all just raw emotion, and bodily functions. Instinct. That’s what it was. It was what animals did. Humans were on a higher plane, and should be above that nonsense.

“None of those nurses looked like you, though,” said Will, his eyes glinting.

Erica was jerked back to reality.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to apologize, because I was afraid I had disappointed you.”

Among the roiling emotions that were bouncing all over Erica Bradford’s body, the ones associated with that maternal instinct surfaced and shouted for order, telling all other thoughts to go away.

“You could never disappoint me,” she said, as tears made her vision blurry. “I love you. I’ll always love you. It doesn’t matter how you look, or any of that. You’re my brother and I love you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry about that shot about your virginity at supper.”

“It wasn’t a shot,” she said. “For your information I am still a virgin, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

“Wow,” he sighed.

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Like you said, I’m the last person you should listen to about your sex life.”

“What about my sex life?” she asked. She felt foolish immediately, seeing as how she didn’t have a sex life. Not with anything other than her fingers, anyway.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about this kind of thing,” he said.

“I don’t,” she responded.

“Okay, then,” he said. The right side of his face smiled. “I’m going to bed now. That means I’m going to take off my clothes. Ever since those nurses gave me those ... um ... treatments ... it’s kind of become a habit, I guess. So you should probably leave now, before I take my pants off, cause if you stay you’re going to see way more than you want to.”

Erica felt the heat of the blood that infused her skin over her upper chest and then crept up her throat to her cheeks, going even higher until her forehead felt hot. She turned and left.

“You want me to get the light?” she asked, stopping with her back to him.

“Please.”

She flipped the switch, closed the door, and went to her room.

She sat on the edge of her bed, her hands in her lap. If she went to bed now, she knew she’d rub. Will was doing that, in his room. He was doing it right now, probably. Her nipples itched and wanted to be squeezed and pulled.

She knew better than to try to read in bed. She didn’t even want to take her robe off and put her pajamas on, because her breasts would be bare for a few seconds, and she didn’t think she’d be able to resist touching her nipples. That would lead to more. She stood, picked up her book and started to the living room, to sit upright in a chair, where maybe she could pay attention to the pages.

She flipped the light off and stood, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Then, stepping into the hallway, she started tiptoeing to the living room. Her feet stopped in front of Will’s door and she couldn’t seem to make them keep going. She also lost the internal battle to keep her right hand off of his doorknob, and felt almost consumed with shame as it turned the knob slowly ... silently. She didn’t understand what was happening to her. This ... urge inside her ... it was something she had never felt before and it was something that made her hand tremble as it controlled her.

She managed to stand there, with the door open only two inches, for what seemed like ten minutes. She felt a tiny spark of hope that she had gained control, when she heard him moan. The door was suddenly open eighteen more inches before she realized her arm had pushed it there.

She felt a stab of almost hysteria as she looked at the bed, with the dark lump of her brother on it, and realized she couldn’t see anything. Instead of feeling relief that this was all futile, she felt the overwhelming urge to go closer ... until she could see something.

“If you’re going to watch, you may as well come on in.” One of the things she thought of first was that her brother’s voice sounded so normal, just as she remembered it, perhaps with a bit of maturity added. That conflicted with the shame of being caught spying on him.

“I wasn’t watching,” she blurted. “You sounded like you were in pain.”

“I am in pain,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I do this.”

That didn’t make any sense to her and she stood there, not knowing what to do.

“Are you coming in?”

“I don’t know.” She felt sudden relief at voicing her inability to make a sensible decision. It felt so good to just admit that she had no idea what was happening.

“I don’t mind,” he said.

That didn’t make any sense either. The rational part of her mind let her curiosity be piqued. She stepped into the room, but didn’t turn on the light.

“How can you not mind?” she asked.

He was silent for a few seconds.

“It’s complicated, I guess. I’d tell you, but I don’t think you’d like it. I know what you said about loving me and all that, but I still think you might be a little ... disappointed.”

“I don’t understand.” That felt pretty good too, because she didn’t understand ... not only what he was saying, but what she was feeling.

He moved on the bed, and she imagined that he was rolling to face her. She wondered if he was naked or not. That bothered her a little.

“You said you’re still a virgin,” he said. “But haven’t you ever been really horny before? Like maybe when you were with a certain guy?”

“I’ve felt things,” she said. “But usually the guy was being such a jerk that it wasn’t something I wanted to explore.”

“How about when you looked at some guy you didn’t know, who wasn’t a jerk yet?” he asked.

Bobby Dalton immediately popped into her mind. She didn’t like that at all, because she wanted to believe he was a jerk too. The problem there was that he kept acting like a not-jerk.

“No,” she lied.

He sighed. “I guess guys are different,” he said. “I can look at a woman I don’t know and get excited.”