Chapter 4

Hawaii was much better for me this time. It was being there with someone else, having someone to share all the experiences with. We spent the first week on Oahu, at a nice little condo in Honolulu. Tina and I were in one bedroom, with Sherry staying in the other. On two of our nights there, Tina and Sherry went to bed together in Sherry's room. Both nights, a few hours after she went to bed in her sister's room, Tina came back to our bedroom and crawled into bed with me. Both times, her face smelled of pussy, and her pussy was gushing and swollen from having been stimulated by something or someone. She certainly wasn't trying to hide what they'd been doing. The second time she'd been with Sherry, Tina started taking me to task for my seeming reluctance to move things forward with her sister.

"You have to make the first move with her, Jimmy. She's ready, but she needs that first push to come from you. She's a lot more passive than I am."

"Right, you're about as passive as Attila the Hun. I see what you're trying to do here, and I'm not falling for it."

"Oh really? You think I'm trying to trick you? We both know you've got the hots for her, so what's your problem? She wants you to do it; she just needs to be able to pretend it was all your idea. She's always been that way, since long before the time she got raped. Even now, she pretends she doesn't want to do things with me. I have to take the lead with her. If I don't make a move on her for awhile, she'll do things to really annoy me until I finally do. After someone makes her get started though, that somehow makes it all right for her to let herself go, to join in with everything. She just needs that first little push."

"Even if I was attracted to her, the way you've always claimed, you're the one I'm in a relationship with, not her."

"I know that. You think I'd be jealous, but I've been trying to convince you that I'm really not. Sherry and I are extremely close, and always have been. We've been doing what we did together tonight, ever since we were thirteen years old. Only with her though, no other girls for me, not ever. With her, it's more about the closeness we feel towards each other than it is just the sex. Unlike me, Sherry has been with other girls and women. No matter what ends up happening with you and me, Sherry and I will still be close like we are. I don't think I could survive if she wasn't in my life like she always has been."

We made love for the longest time. It was a gentler, more clinging coming together sort of lovemaking. As much kissing and touching, as actual thrusting and pressing ourselves together. It seemed to take me forever to come. Tina had several orgasms to my one, although hers seemed more restrained than they usually were. She drew them out and savored every second of them, but seemed to act calmer than was the usual case when she came with me before. After I came, we stopped, with me rolling off her so I'd be on my back. Slow or not, my breathing was sharp and ragged, as though I'd just finished a sprint race.

"You need to tell me now, tell me tonight, tell me right now."

I knew what she meant. I'd been half expecting that she'd make another demand like this one. I'd tried three or four times to tell her, over the past six days we'd been in Hawaii. I didn't know what it was that was keeping me too afraid to actually say the words to her. I'd said those words to several other girls, back when I was in school and dating, and I'd last said them to Leslie. I knew I felt more for Tina than I had for all those other girls and women. I wanted to tell her I loved her without her having to prompt me to do so.

"I'm not going to tell you if you keep pestering me to do it. If I love you, then I'll tell you myself. You won't have to force the words out of me."

"I already know you do, Jimmy, but hearing you say you do is like the next step for us. Until you tell me you do, we can't go past where we are now."

In a funny way, I found myself knowing what she meant by that. It was like something finally clicked on inside my brain. Telling her I loved her wasn't the final step that I'd been treating it as being. It was just another milestone along the pathway of our future together. An important milestone, to be sure, but not the end all and be all that I'd been making it out to be. For the first time in awhile, I felt myself relaxing around Tina, letting some of the tension from what I saw as our main conflict ease itself away.

I had a fairly good idea about what the progression of events would be, once I finally told her the words she was so anxious to hear me say. Telling her I loved her would remove the final barricade I'd set up as a defensive shield to keep her from being able to totally take over my life. It would be like giving her permission to start planning out our future. Marriage, kids, the whole ball of wax. Once I said the words to her, she'd have carte blanche to go ahead with everything else she wanted to plan for the two of us.

I was thirty one years old, she was only twenty four. When I'd graduated high school, she'd been an eleven year old. She was too young for me for one thing. The difference between her childhood and mine was another big thing too. I couldn't very well marry her and not take her out to see Danny, Kaitlyn and the rest of my family. I'd seen her parent's house, and when I contrasted that house with Danny and Kaitlyn's trailer, it brought home to me the vast economic gulf between our two families.

I just wasn't good enough for her, and I never would be. I'd escaped from my low life surroundings, even managing to make something of myself, financially speaking, in the process of doing so. I'd gone from making my money by buying and selling other people's junk, to having a nice, very profitable, wholesale wind chime business.

In my own estimate of myself though, I was still just a junkman. I'd never escape who I really was, no matter how much distance I tried to put between myself and my family. I was no better than they were, just a little luckier, and not plagued by so many personal weaknesses, that's all.

"You don't really know that much about me. You can't really know, not until you've seen for yourself where I came from, and had the chance to meet the people who raised me, and who had such a strong influence on coloring the way I look at things. When we get back to California, after this part of our trip is over, I'll take you and Sherry up to meet my family, so you can see for yourself how I grew up, and what kind of life I'm used to living."

"You've already told me a lot about them, and the things that happened to you before you moved out to Patler. I'd love to meet your family, but nothing I learn while I'm there will ever be able to change how I feel about you, or how much I love you."

"Easy for you to tell me that now. We come from different world's, Tina, And I've been trying to pretend I could fit into your world, just like you've been trying to fit into mine by living the way you do. Any time you felt like it, you could have gone back and made up with your folks. If you did that you'd be a part of the aristocratic, upper crust, society again. I'll always be a part of the two pitchers of beer and an extra large two topping pizza for twenty bucks crowd that gathers around down at the bowling alley."

"You think I'm just playing at being a starving artist? That I still have the same choices that Sherry used to have, before she set that fire? You're wrong if you think that. I haven't spoken one word to either of my parents, not since way back when I first turned eighteen. Sherry and I were both given an ultimatum then. I chose my way, and she chose hers. This complete separation from my parents was their choice, not mine. I was never mad at them before they kicked me out of their house. I live like I do, because that's the best I can manage on what I can earn for myself. I'd live just like you do if I could afford to. I'm waiting though, and my time for living comfortably again will soon be coming. None of this has even the least bit of relevance when it comes to determining whether or not you love me though. You either do or you don't. Don't try making excuses, or coming up with any fake reasons for not telling me if you do."

"We'll go see them anyway. You should get a chance to meet them either way it ends up going for us. You won't ever be able to understand the way I am until after you've met my family, and have seen for yourself how it was for me, growing up with them like I did."

Tina's attitude was subdued after that. I could see how frustrated my stubborn refusal to declare my love for her was making her. Added to this was her failure to get me to make any move on Sherry. I had managed to get through the first week in Hawaii without succumbing to temptation with regard to her. We were packed up and about to leave the condo for the cruise ship when Tina brought up that particular subject with both her sister and me again.

"You both need to stop pussyfooting around with each other. It's really starting to get on my nerves. You know you both want to, so just do it and get it over with. Tonight, on the ship, you two need to sleep together."

We took a cab down to where the cruise ship was anchored. We waited in line for the better part of an hour before they finally started letting us move our things on board. Our stateroom was nothing fancy, but it was a little bigger than what I'd been expecting. There were three single beds in the room, with two of them pushed together, while the third one was all the way across the open space, over by the door.

"Jimmy, help me move this other bed over with those other two. Yours will be the one in the center. It has rollers, so it will be easy to move it back to where it now is in the morning."

"Tina, I don't appreciate it when you keep trying to force everyone to do what you want. Why don't you just relax about this thing? Sherry doesn't need you putting all this pressure on her either. Let's just relax and enjoy the cruise, okay?"

"No, it isn't okay. You spent a lot of money to bring us on this nice vacation, and Sherry needs to show her appreciation to you for it. She said she would before we left your house, and she hasn't done squat while we've been here, not even offering you a blow job."

I left that one alone. To keep everything calmed down between us, I went over and helped Tina with moving the bed. This seemed to satisfy her. She was all smiles as we pushed it over to where the other two were.

"Do you want a blow job, Jimmy?" Sherry almost whispered the words to me. She had moved up right behind me when I was putting that third bed alongside the other two. I turned to look at her and her face was all flushed and she refused to look at my face in return. I could see that it had been difficult for her to get the question out. I was going to tell her no, but Tina spoke up before I got the chance to.

"Don't answer that, Jimmy. She's trying to trick you into telling her no. Sherry, tell Jimmy what you told me after that night in the hotel in Los Angeles."

The flush on Sherry's face got deeper, and I could see the first hint of her own fiery temper in her eyes as she turned to look right at Tina.

"All I said was it looked like you were having fun."

"That isn't all you said, and you know it. Tell him the other parts, about how hot it made you looking at his big dick going in and out, and how you wished it was you he was fucking."