Chapter 3

By the end of that first week, I already had an idea percolating in my brain. There had been a story in the newspaper about a young boy, from somewhere back East, who had found an old nickel in some change he had. The nickel turned out to be very rare, and he had ended up selling it to a coin shop dealer, for five hundred dollars. What I needed to do was find another rare coin, but one that was worth at least three or four thousand dollars.

San Pedro was a fishing port more than a shipping one. On average, the residents were working class people, with a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe. There were some families who were financially well off, but, for most of the kids attending my school, the concept of needing to work hard just to live half way decently was well known. Those new to the U.S. seemed more appreciative than those native born. I was surprised at how few of the people I was meeting were originally from California. Even Cheryl and her family had originally been from New Jersey, although they'd moved to California when Cheryl and Daniel had only been five years old.

Once I no longer had to see that my brothers got home safely from school, I started walking Cheryl home each school day afternoon. Both her parents worked, and Daniel had a girl friend of his own, who he walked home to her house every day.

Cheryl liked kissing, and the two of us usually spent at least a half hour alone in her back yard, sheltered by a wooden fence and tall bushes from any curious eyes. Kissing was all that Cheryl would allow, although she didn't mind sitting on my lap, facing away from me, while I kissed her neck. She had to be feeling my hard on when she sat on me, but having my boner pressing against her ass didn't appear to be any problem for her. I'd made numerous attempts to get my hands inside her winter coat, but had been thwarted every time. If I pressed her too hard, she'd end our kissing sessions early, so I mostly limited myself to a few attempts each afternoon, backing off whenever she grabbed my wrist and stopped me. She was really a great kisser, easily the best kisser I'd ever been with, and she taught me a lot about how to kiss a girl. Cheryl was very sensitive to kisses on her neck, and anywhere on or near her ears.

One day I sat her down on my lap and just started in kissing her neck and ears, staying mostly away from her mouth for the first fifteen minutes. When we did get around to some tongue and mouth kissing, I noticed that Cheryl seemed more responsive than usual, and that her breath and lips felt quite a bit warmer than they usually did. I hadn't made any attempt to cop a feel of her boobs.

Cheryl was cute, but definitely on the slender side, with small breasts and narrow hips. She had curly light brown hair, which she wore short, and these enormous brown eyes. She was darker skinned than her twin brother. Daniel had lighter hair color too, and was my height, around five ten or so. Cheryl claimed to be five foot five, but I knew she was exaggerating, by at least an inch or two.

In my experience, girls and women are a perverse lot. In the past, when I'd tried so many times to get my hands on her breasts, Cheryl had always prevented me from doing so. This one time when I was content not trying to feel her up, she took my hand in both of hers, and carefully placed it inside her coat, right over her left breast. I'd gotten this far with several girls, back in Ohio, but this was as far as I'd ever gotten before. I went back to concentrating on her neck and ears, gently moving my hand, exploring her small breast as I did so.

I'm not sure when I first became aware of Cheryl squirming around in my lap. At first, I thought my dick must be poking her ass uncomfortably, assuming she was trying to find a different position where she could escape it doing that to her. I got embarrassed, hoping she wasn't going to tell me I needed to let her go inside and that I needed to leave. When she raised up a little from my lap, that was what I expected her to do. Instead, she gathered up her dress and sat right back down on my lap again, straddling exactly the place where my dick had been poking her. I went right back to kissing and licking on her ears and neck, and she kept making these tiny movements back and forth against the lump in my pants. This went on for a good thirty minutes after she'd first raised herself up and adjusted her dress. It was the longest make out session I'd ever been involved with.

When she did finally stand up to tell me it was time to go, her eyes dropped down to my lap and she gave a big groan. I looked down there too, after she groaned, and saw that there was a big wet spot, about a five inch circle, around the head of my dick. I knew I hadn't cum, and that there was no way all of that wet stain had come from me. If it wasn't from me, then it had to be from her. I knew that girl's pussies got wet when they got hot, because I'd heard other guys mentioning that. From the stricken look on Cheryl's face, I was positive that she knew where that wetness had come from.

"I'm so sorry, Jim. I didn't know. That's so embarrassing. I know what you must be thinking."

I could see she was really becoming upset. I didn't want that. This time together had been very exciting for me, and I certainly didn't want anything spoiling the chances of our repeating it soon.

"Cheryl, don't worry about that. Sweating is something that happens when your body heats up. I'm sweating under my arms quite a lot too. It will dry out before I'm halfway home."

I could see I wasn't fooling her by what I said, but I'd given her a way out of what she was mostly worried about. It was easier for her to pretend I was stupid, and that I didn't know that it was her pussy that had leaked juices all over my leg. She knew what had really happened while she'd been rubbing her panties against the head of my dick as she'd kept it trapped between her clenching and unclenching thighs. As long as her thinking me stupid meant she might continue making out with me, I was totally in favor of that.

"Still, it is late, and I need to get inside and start on all my homework. I'll see you in school tomorrow." She turned away from me and went over to her back door and opened it up. She didn't even look back or give me her usual goodbye wave. As soon as I got home, I changed out of my school clothes and took my pants into the bathroom and washed that wet spot with hot water and soap. Of course, before I began to wash it, I'd put the wet area close to my nose and sniffed at it. It definitely wasn't sweat, but I'd needed to make sure anyway.

I usually waited to take my shower until after the younger kids were in bed, because it was more private that way, and people weren't as likely to come into the bathroom needing to use the toilet then. This time I decided I couldn't wait that long. No one came in to disturb me, and it didn't take me long to finish what I needed to do in any case.

My plan for coming up with a single rare coin, and a plausible story for how I might have acquired it, wasn't proceeding as smoothly as I'd first hoped. For one thing, I'd learned that whatever I could buy in a coin shop, for four thousand dollars, couldn't be turned around and sold back to them for anything close to what I'd originally paid. I had a dealer I'd gone to tell me that he would only buy things back for half of what he sold them to me for.

That was extremely discouraging. I was close to giving up on the whole idea, right before I noticed a small advertisement in the want ads, under coins and collectibles for sale. Someone wanted to sell some Carson City minted silver dollars. What first caught my eye was a phrase the person selling these coins had highlighted in bold typeface: WELL BELOW DEALER PRICES.

I called the number listed with the ad and found out the seller lived about ten miles away from my house. From his voice, I could tell he was an old man. He could apparently tell, from my own voice, that I was a younger person. He agreed to meet me at his bank to show me his coins though, after I first told him that I had several thousand dollars I wanted to invest in collector coins. His bank was even further away from my house than the city where he lived. It was in downtown Los Angeles, thirty miles from where I was living. I'd need to take a bus to and from there. What would be worse, was my having to ditch a day of school in order to go see what the man was interested in selling.

If the whole thing hadn't been so important to my family, at least in my mind, I'd have just given up on my idea right then. The Sunday before, my mother had talked my father into taking all of us to look at the models already built by the builder in Garden Grove. We spent only half an hour looking at the model with the floor plan my parents were set on buying, then another forty five minutes in the five bedroom house.

I could see how excited my mother was as she showed all us kids how much bigger and roomier this house was. It made the first house we looked at seem small and cramped. I could see my father was getting angry with my mother for getting everybody worked up and excited over something we'd never be able to afford. In some ways, my father was much more practical than my mother. He didn't allow himself to set his sights on goals he knew he'd never achieve.

"You know, "Kitten", all you're accomplishing with this, is to make all the rest of us dissatisfied with getting a house we might actually be able to afford. If I thought for one second that we could swing the payments for this one here, don't you think I'd want to get it for you? I've had enough of some people thinking I don't amount to much, I don't need any more of that from my own family. Let's go, it's getting late, and we still have to get home and see about getting some supper."

"Kitten" was my father's pet name for my mother. Her real name was Christina, but most people called her Chrissy. After my father said what he had, I could see my mother starting to regret what she'd done by bringing all of us to see the "Super house" too. That's what she had started calling it too, the "Super house". She called the other one, the one they were actually expecting to buy, the house.

My father was already working all the overtime he could get, even volunteering to work double shifts, if there were any openings. This extra money is what was making it possible for us to even consider owning rather than renting. We had gotten all my parent's debts paid off, from before, and they had managed to save over seven hundred dollars extra, since he'd gotten his new job.

My father was quiet during the whole ride back to San Pedro. My mother tried, several times, to lighten his mood, telling him she was thrilled to have the home we could afford. She tried getting my father to believe she had just wanted us kids to see that other home so we'd know how important it was to do well in school, get a good job afterwards, and then save up your money, to eventually buy the nicest home we could afford. My father wasn't buying it. Anyone who knew my mother at all would know what she'd really been hoping to accomplish.

My father knew he could probably afford the payments on the "Super home", for as long as his current overtime hours held up. He also knew that the company was still hiring, wanting to get to a place where they had enough workers to eliminate the more expensive overtime payments. He had said several times that we could make our house payment on the house they were buying, because he wouldn't need any overtime to do it. He had done too good of a selling job on my mother, convincing her that our house payment would be less than our current rent. With taxes, utilities and insurance added in though, that hadn't actually been true before, even back when they had a maximum ceiling of ten thousand dollars as a purchase price figure.

My mother wasn't used to thinking in terms of large numbers. She probably figured, if an extra thousand dollars hadn't made too much of a difference, why not an extra forty five hundred? I sat in the back seat with my two brothers, knowing I had plenty of money to solve this whole problem. I also knew, instinctively, that it was very important that my father be the one who provided our family with a home, no matter what size that home eventually turned out being. Anything else would rob him of the sense of accomplishment he deserved for the sacrifice he was already making, to work all those extra hours, hoping to be able to provide this new home for all of us.