Chapter 5: Heat

I laid in bed thinking about a little encounter I'd had with Sheila at a party while I was trying to come up with a way to proposition her for the director's chair of our homemade porno movie.

Sheila Unger and I had been friends since elementary school. She sat in the desk next to me a few years in a row, and we usually walked home together as kids, just talking and being ourselves. There was never anything romantic between us, but we did get naked together a couple of times since we'd reached puberty. We almost lost our virginities to each other as well, but we chickened out for whatever reason.

I'd found some old Playboys my dad had stored away when we were around twelve or thirteen, and we were going up into the hot sweaty attic one summer afternoon to look at them. I was nervous as hell, afraid we'd get caught. She insisted she wanted to see them, so I decided to take the risk.

I opened the trunk and moved an old sweater aside. Beneath it were stacks and stacks of porn magazines in varying states of wear. They weren't really all Playboys. There were all kinds of titles actually. But to a horny little teenager who doesn't know the difference, every nudie mag is a "Playboy".

We looked through the issues one by one, pictorial by pictorial, skipping over all the boring articles and advertisements, studying the private parts in great detail.

But horror of horrors, my mom suddenly called up the attic stairs, "Anthony, are you up there?"

We hadn't heard her car drive up at all.

Sheila jumped away from me as though the magazine had turned into a live cobra or something. I jumped up as well and flew instantly into a chaos of panic.

"Yeah, mom. I'm here! I'll be right down!" I said, trying to disguise my insane fear. At any second she could have started up the stairs, one by one, and caught us in front of a trunk full of Playboys. We froze like deer in the headlights, afraid to make a single sound.

"Well, hurry up. Grandma's coming over and I want you to wash up before she gets here."

"Okay, mom. I'll be right down."

"What are you doing up there, anyway?" my mom asked.

"Just ... showing Sheila something."

"Sheila's up there with you?"

"Uh, yeah. We're were looking at some old clothes, for a school play."

"Well you better not be making a mess up there, you two!" my mom said.

"We're not..."

Then she was gone again.

"That was too fucking close," Sheila said.

I put the magazines away and closed up the trunk, replacing the sweater exactly as it had been. We composed ourselves, and caught our breath. Then we headed downstairs

"Man, you guys are sweaty! What were you doing up there?"

"It's just hot up there, mom. You know that," I replied with a nervous chuckle.

"Want a cookie, dear?" mom asked Sheila.

She reached for a chocolate fudge cookie with trembling fingers. Mom noticed, but said nothing.

School started a few weeks later, Junior High, and we were in separate classes. We were still friends of course, and we said a cheerful hello every time we passed one another in the halls, but we gradually grew apart. We made different friends, and our lives went down different paths over the next few years. Eventually we barely talked at all.

A couple of years later, when we were both fifteen, we happened to be at the same party with a mutual friend whose parents were out of town. As it happens at these high school parties, everybody seemed to be paring-off for private make out sessions in bedrooms, chairs, couches, and closets. There was even one couple on rug on the bathroom floor. Some were already couples when they arrived. Others just made things up as they went along, driven together by opportunity and hormones.

As it also typically happened at these things I wasn't getting any action. The last available girl had wandered off with some other guy, leaving me alone on the couch with Sheila. I resigned myself to yet another party where the only thing I was holding was a beer. I'd known Sheila for so long, the idea of making out with her didn't even occur to me. We were the only two kids in the place who were not all over each other. It worked out okay that way I guess, since we were friends and had a lot of catching up to do.

We spent the first half-hour just drinking and talking about what was going on in our lives. Then of course, we broke into reminiscing about the good old days. We were both getting a little drunk by then, and Sheila said something that surprised me.

"Thanks to you, I'm a porn addict now, Ant."

"What do you mean?" I said, half laughing at the idea.

"I mean I have a whole stack of porno mags at home, a couple of hard-core novels, and even some vids."

"So how is that my fault?"

"You and your fucking Playboys in the attic. Don't tell me you don't remember."

"Of course I remember. But how does that make you a porn addict?"

"Okay, I'm not really a porn addict. I do have a bit of a fixation on it though. Ah, never mind. I'm just drunk."

"But you do have actual boyfriends too, right? You're not just hiding away in books and movies?"

"Nope. No boyfriend." She sighed long and hard. "I finally faced the facts, man. I'm just Chicken-legs Sheila Unger. If I ever land a boyfriend, it'll surely be out of pity."

"I'm sure it's not that bad."

"You don't see any guys lining up to take me into a closet for a sleazy little romp, do you?"

Sheila was a tall, skinny girl with dirty blond hair, and a relatively plain-looking face. She had a really pretty smile when she chose to share it with you, and fairly alluring eyes when she looked at you in a certain way. She did have a little bit of a figure, though she was very thin. At that point, she barely had any breasts, but she had a nice round little bum and a narrow waist. Overall she was kinda cute, but in a little sister kind of way. She wasn't ugly though, like she seemed to believe.

There was a cry of orgasmic ecstasy from a room down the hall, and several of the couples scattered around the house cheered at it. The screams continued. Whoever it was they were really going for it, hard and fast. It almost sounded pornish.

Sheila began making fuck faces and motions, mocking the girl in the bedroom with a perfect lip sync performance of getting rammed really hard. I laughed out loud, falling back on the couch and holding my stomach. But then I just stared at her as she continued. I was suddenly reminded that Sheila was in fact a girl after all, with parts like a girl, and hormones like a girl, and she was apparently willing to use them too. And there I was less than a foot away, with just as many hormones, and complementary parts. Why hadn't I thought of this sooner? Suddenly, in the dim light of some tabletop lamp, I was staring at her potential.

Her performance faded away as quickly as it had started, and she sighed again, chucking a beer cap into the pile on the table.

"Why can't I get lucky like that once in a while? It's not like I have leprosy or something. I may be tall and skinny, and maybe I don't look like Christina Aguilera, but it's not like-"

I'm not sure what she was about to say. I didn't really care. I just grabbed her and kissed her. She looked sorta hot to my slightly drunken eyes, sitting there with her legs slightly parted in my direction, sort of half-slouched beside me on the couch after her sexy performance. So I just grabbed her and kissed her. The hormones had won.

She held up her hands defensively against me at first, but then melted into me. She even let out a surprised little moan when my tongue slipped into her mouth to dance with hers. It was quite a powerful kiss, perhaps Sheila's first. I had no idea. Finally we broke away and I paused, staring into her eyes.

"Why'd you do that?" she asked, a little out of breath.

"I think you have a beautiful smile, Sheila. I always have. You're much prettier than you realize. I just wanted to show you, I guess. And besides, I just had to shut you up from going on about what a loser you are. It's not true and it's very lame of you to say so."

"Sorry."

"You are quite a kisser, though. You can't be that much of an outcast."

"I still don't know why you did that. We're just friends, aren't we?"

"Of course we're friends. I don't know. Does it have to stop there?"

"This is the horniness talking."

"So?"

She looked at me for a moment, thinking. And then she gave me that sweet smile of hers.

Then she kissed me once more. I returned the kiss of course and we slowly slid down into reclining over the couch, with me on top of her.

We didn't talk much more after that. We didn't finish out beers. We just kissed, and kissed, and kissed, until finally my hormones got the better of me and I felt her up. She didn't resist. Her breath became deeper and quicker, and she released a soft little moan.

"Just friends, huh?" she said.

"You don't think this is friendly enough?"

She shut up and kissed me some more.

Puberty had done some nice things to us both in the past couple of years. We found ourselves out of breath with the excitement of fumbling and feeling out the changes the years had made in our bodies. Eventually Sheila was being as aggressive as I was, touching me everywhere, grabbing me, squeezing me, and putting my hands on different parts of her body where she wanted to be touched in return.

A few minutes later I had her bra off and was feeling her up directly. I had moved on to kissing her neck and ears, and was on my way down to her breasts when she finally stopped me.

"Okay, whoa, Anthony. Maybe we should stop now, huh? What is this gonna mean for us later, if this goes any further?"