Chapter 7

Dinner was Italian. They were not dressed like the other customers in the upscale bistro, but neither cared. They were put in a booth right by the kitchen door, but didn't care about that either. There was little talk while they ate. Bob told her what he'd learned about her parents' treatment. She was subdued.

When they got to the rooms, her listlessness evaporated like magic when she realized he'd gotten her her own room.

"I'm n-n-not stay-y-ying in h-h-here al-l-lone!" she said loudly.

"It's for the best, baby," he pleaded.

"W-w-why?" she almost shouted.

Bob groaned. He knew this girl and he knew how stubborn she could be when she got fired up. He didn't need her getting fired up, but he also didn't need anything else to happen between them.

"Look, sweetie, I love you. You know that. So I just want you to trust me when I tell you it's better if we're not staying in the same room. I mean you need your privacy sometimes, and I keep forgetting to tell you when I'm coming out of the bathroom and stuff like that. And I'll be right next door to you if you need me, or want to talk or something. Please give it a try. I'm sure it will be more comfortable for both of us."

Jennifer lay in bed, staring at the TV set. She wasn't interested in anything that was on. She wasn't quite so worried about her parents anymore. They looked horrible, but they were breathing and everybody seemed to think they'd be all right. She knew it would take a long time for them to get better, and that she'd have to help a lot, but she didn't care about that. They were alive and they'd be okay.

Her mind was currently working furiously on something else anyway.

At first she'd been hurt that Bob wouldn't let her stay in his room. It was tempting to think that he didn't want to be around her, but she knew that wasn't true. She knew he loved her. That was the problem. She loved him, too, and she wanted to be around him. So why was he acting this way?

She didn't buy all that privacy crap. Sure there had been a few accidents, where he saw things he wasn't supposed to see. Except that she didn't really care if he saw them. That gave her pause for thought too. She was quite sure that if any other man had seen between her legs like that, that she would have been mortified. But she wasn't ... when it was Bob. She was sure that was because she loved him so much. She was also sure he'd liked seeing her like that. She'd seen it in his face. She might not have much experience with men, but the look on his face that morning had spoken volumes.

So why was he making her stay in her own room?

She looked at the door in the wall. Bob was on the other side of it. It didn't have a slot for her card. It took a regular key to open it. He'd said she could still talk to him if she needed to, but he hadn't unlocked that door. She couldn't understand why he'd put that barrier between them.

She lay there, replaying in her mind what had happened during the past twenty-four hours. He'd caught her watching that movie. She knew he'd seen her hand in her panties. That had been embarrassing and scary, but he hadn't punished her - he'd hugged her.

They'd slept together. She knew that wasn't what people meant when they said someone was sleeping with someone else, but those people didn't understand how important this man was to her. She would have gone crazy without him if she'd had to do all this by herself.

She remembered her dream. She remembered waking up and seeing Uncle Bob standing there with his penis big and long and hard in his underwear. She hadn't had time to think about what that meant ... until now. What did that mean?

She reviewed what she knew about penises. Most of it, quite honestly, came from Bambi Bangs Baltimore. A penis was soft, at first, until a man wanted to have sex. Then a woman played with it and it got hard. Then they had sex for a long time, changing positions several times, probably because it was uncomfortable or something, and eventually the penis squirted and got soft again.

She blinked. Who had played with Bob's penis to get it all hard like that? And he hadn't had sex with anybody, but when he came out of the bathroom, it had been soft again. Except that when he saw her pussy, it started to get hard again.

She closed her eyes and remembered the look of that long, thick line in his underwear. He had been hard. She was sure of that. But if he was hard that meant he wanted to have sex, and there was nobody in the room to have sex with...

Her eyes popped open and she stopped breathing. She had been the only woman in the room! Uncle Bob had wanted to have sex with her!

In the room next door, Bob was also lying on the bed with the TV on.

He'd gotten into bed with the idea of letting the TV lull him to sleep. He had flipped through the channels until he hit a public TV station that was showing a documentary on the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He let himself get caught up in the images of thousands of planes, ships and men all rushing hell bent into the kind of danger he understood. Or thought he'd understood. He was appalled at the images of men trying to land under withering fire, and amazed at the bravery of those who kept moving forward while others dropped all around them. His heartbeat increased to twice its normal rate as the pictures and the voice of the narrator mesmerized him.

It was for that reason, and perhaps because the TV was providing the only light in the room, that he didn't see the door connecting his room to Jennifer's swing open. It wasn't until she tossed her pillow onto the bed beside him that he was aware he wasn't alone. That pillow landing beside him also startled him so much he jerked and yelped. He looked up to see Jennifer standing beside the bed. She had on the same long T shirt she'd worn the night before.

"Shit, Jen!" he barked. "You scared the crap out of me!" He blinked. "How did you get in here?"

She turned and pointed at the connecting door, which was standing open now.

"I w-w-went to th-th-the d-d-desk and g-g-got the k-k-key."

She seemed subdued, somehow. She was standing with her arms at her sides, almost stiffly.

"Why didn't you just come knock on my door?" he asked.

"B-b-because I was in-n-n my n-n-night g-g-gown," she said.

Bob was unsettled enough that he missed the fact that if she wasn't willing to go in the hallway in her "nightgown," she surely hadn't gone down to get the key to the connecting door in it, which meant she could have knocked then. All he thought about was that she had appeared so suddenly.

"Is anything wrong?"

"I d-d-don't know," she said. "M-m-maybe."

He started to sit up and then remembered that one of the benefits of having separate rooms was that he could sleep like he usually slept ... nude. He thought better of letting the covers drop from his chest to his lap by sitting up.

"You want to talk about it?" he asked, not sure of anything else to say.

She nodded.

"Okay," he said. "Turn on a light and I'll turn the TV off and we'll talk."

"C-c-can we l-l-leave the l-l-lights off?" she asked.

That puzzled Bob, initially, until he remembered some of the things they'd "talked" about recently ... things that could embarrass her.

"Sure," he said. His natural reaction was to press the red button on the remote and the room suddenly went pitch black. He patted the bed beside him and said, "You can sit here, by me."

He was completely unprepared when, instead of sitting beside him, she lifted the covers, like she had the night before, and slid in next to him. She didn't hug him, as she had before. She lay on her back beside him, in fact, and only her elbow and hip touched him.

"Um, Jen!" he said softly. "I'm not exactly dressed."

"Y-y-you weren't d-d-dressed last n-n-night either," she replied.

"Well, I'm even less dressed tonight," he said. "That's part of that privacy I was talking about. That's how I usually sleep."

"Oh."

She was quiet for long enough that Bob got nervous. Her voice sounded different tonight. He couldn't put his finger on exactly how it was different, but he knew it was. Maybe she was still upset about him making her stay in her own room. Except that she wasn't in her own room. She was in his room. And he wasn't prepared for her to be there.

"I'll get up and put something on," he said.

"No!"

"I don't want you to be uncomfortable."

"I'm n-n-not."

It was quiet again for what seemed like ten minutes, but was really only forty-five seconds. During that time, though, Bob's brain reflected on the fact that she knew he was naked, and didn't care. She hadn't gotten out of the bed. She hadn't rolled away from him. He felt himself get erect in what seemed like record time and that scared him. He needed to get this girl out of his bed. The only way he could think of was getting her to talk out whatever was on her mind, so he could tell her to go back to her room.

"So ... you said you wanted to talk about something," Bob prodded.

Another fifteen seconds of silence got him worried, and then she spoke.

"Y-y-you said w-w-we c-c-could t-t-talk about an-n-nything ... right?"

Bob felt something like fear begin to nibble at his consciousness. A true warrior knows that fear is not a sign of weakness. It's a natural reaction to a dangerous situation. But fear creates energy. One of the things a true warrior learns is how to channel that energy into something that could, hopefully, be used to lessen the danger. In this case, the danger was something that sounded entirely too open-ended to Bob.

"I did," he admitted, carefully. It was quiet for another fifteen seconds.

"I h-h-have a p-p-prob-b-blem," she finally said.

"Okay," he said noncommittally.

"It's ... um ... th-th-this," she said.

"This." Bob was confused.

"Uh huh."

"This," Bob said again. His confusion was apparent.

"B-b-being in b-b-bed with y-y-you," she explained.

Bob just said what came into his mind. "I can understand that," he said. "That's why I got you your own room."

"N-n-no," she said, sounding patient. "Wh-wh-when I w-w-was in b-b-bed with y-y-you last n-n-night... " She moved her arms and legs before she went on. "I ... I ... I l-l-liked it."

Bob's mind viewed that comment from several directions at once. He could understand, on an innocent level, how it's nice to be cozy in a warm bed with another person. He remembered, however, her pussy rubbing on his thigh and her hand resting on his prick, neither of which was on the innocent side of the equation. And that led him to think about how much HE had enjoyed being in bed with her, too, even though he was not proud of what he'd been thinking about while he enjoyed it. He was not proud that his stiff prick was jerking around under the sheet right now either.

His problem was that he wasn't sure how many ways she was looking at this. It was more difficult than he thought it should be, but he took the high road and decided to let her figure things out.

"Do you know why you liked it?"

"I th-th-think so," she said softly.

"Because it makes you feel safe," he suggested hopefully.

She was quiet for a long time and then she finally spoke.

"I d-d-don't think th-th-that's it."

The feeling of danger got stronger. It was like he could almost smell danger, somehow. He didn't know what to do now. He couldn't think of any other innocent reasons she'd want to sleep in the same bed with him, particularly in light of her recent experimentation with things sexual. He felt precum seep through the shaft of his penis and almost said, "Behave yourself!" out loud.