Chapter 4

Waking up the next morning wasn’t romantic at all. My left arm was completely asleep, and it flopped like it was paralyzed. I had to pee something fierce. My mouth felt like leather and I knew my breath stank. Chrissy and I had awakened with morning breath hundreds of times. Chrissy was on the other side of the bed, snoring. Mr. C. was gone.

I got up and, naked, went to the bathroom in Chrissy’s room, where I had my own toothbrush in the rack. I got another T shirt out of my drawer and went to the kitchen to get something to eat. I was starved. I found out why when I looked at the clock on the stove, which said it was eleven in the morning. My parents were probably freaked out of their mind. I was sure they had called the cops.

I called them and my mom picked up after the second ring.

“I’m sorry!” I moaned. “I came over to Chrissy’s last night and fell asleep.”

“Mister Carter was good enough to call us this morning and let us know,” said my mom. “You could have called last night, Mallory.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t plan on staying all night.”

“Well, you’re a big girl now,” said my mother, amazing me. “We’ll see you later today.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

I hung up the phone and turned to find Mr. C. standing there, looking at me.

It could have been weird, I suppose. But he said “Morning, gorgeous,” and everything felt okay.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said. I just had to tease him for some reason. “For a geezer,” I added.

“Are you okay?” he asked, ignoring my barb.

“Do you mean am I walking funny?” I asked. I shook my head. “No. I wouldn’t even have thought about it except you just reminded me.” I took a couple of steps and winced. I threw in a moan for good measure. He looked concerned and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“I see,” he said, frowning. “My girls have decided I’m some dim-witted old fogy who can be gamed night and day.”

“I was just teasing,” I said. “I’m fine, really.”

“And were you just teasing last night, when you helped Chrissy do something really stupid?”

“I didn’t know she was going to do that,” I said. I crossed my heart. “Honest.”

His face changed. “How do you feel about the fact that I ... uh ... didn’t protect you?”

“Curious,” I said.

“That’s it? Just curious?”

“Well, you seem so firm and resolved about not doing that with Chrissy,” I said.

“She’s my daughter,” he said.

“I might as well be,” I replied.

“As much as I agree with you, our blood does not. If I got you pregnant, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for us both.”

“My parents would kill me,” I said.

“I’m not saying it would be a good thing,” he admitted. “But it’s something we could survive. I really did lose control with you last night. I had not intended to do that until you were older.”

“Like this summer?” I asked.

“Like in a year or two,” he said.

“But I’m going to college?” I said. “What if I had met a guy there?”

“I hoped you would,” he said. “I still hope you do. It would be better for you. You deserve a normal life, Mal. What I’ve felt for you all these years has been a crazy, juvenile fantasy and I know it.”

“What about what I’ve felt for you?” I asked.

“Puppy love,” he said. “At least I hope so. You get to always love me as Chrissy’s adopted sister and my adopted daughter, but you deserve a man you can understand and who you have things in common with.”

“Puppy love,” I muttered. Puppy love was what I had for Jerome Quincy in the second grade, and Paul Starkey in the third grade. Boys had gotten tedious after that, and had only been worse as time passed. “Well, I’m not sorry about last night,” I said.

He smiled and I felt flutters in my belly again. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear you say that.”

You’re probably thinking that after that we had Bacchanalian orgies regularly after that. It wasn’t like that at all. He never let Chrissy drink alcohol and never offered any to me, though he had a little Scotch now and then. I don’t know how often he and Chrissy slept together. Or I should say I don’t know how often they made love. She probably slept with him every night except for the ones I did.

Now, you see, when I stayed the night at their house, I didn’t sleep naked in bed with Chrissy any more.

But it wasn’t often either. That summer I got to have him maybe five times.

Part of that was because both Chrissy and I got jobs at the day care center run by a consortium of churches in town. The center itself was at the Methodist church, and it operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We had a packing plant and two other heavy industrial outfits in town that ran around the clock, and their workers needed “day”care around the clock too.

I loved it, because I loved kids. Chrissy was good at it, but she didn’t have the same drive I did. They had a full staff of very committed people. Chrissy and I got hired so they could take vacations or other time off, so our schedules were crazy. Sometimes we worked together, and sometimes we didn’t. We worked all hours of the day and night. They’d have let us work seven days a week if we wanted to. It was good for saving up for college.

But my excuse for spending so much time at Chrissy’s was gone. We had graduated, and we were hopefully going to be roommates at State, so there was no big drive to spend the last days of summer “vacation” together.

I found out the real reason Chrissy wanted her father bareback in her. Condoms are nasty. Maybe if I had never felt it without one I wouldn’t have known the difference. But the first time he went in me with one on I could tell the difference instantly. It wasn’t as warm. I didn’t feel as much. And the warm ball at the end was missing entirely, of course. Then there was this thing hanging off his cock, with white stuff in it, which looked yucky. I know, I know. I was willing to let him shoot that white stuff in my mouth and swallow it. I loved doing that, in fact. But it was different somehow when it was in this bag. I still shudder when I think of a cum-filled condom.

I hated them, but he wouldn’t budge. Apparently my ability to drive him crazy-out-of-control had abated.

But it was still wonderful, and I still loved every second of it. I’d have loved it even more without the condoms, though. And the pill was out of the question, of course. My parents are Catholic. They don’t attend mass, but they’re still Catholic.

And so the summer passed, and the day I wasn’t ready for approached.

And then it was there, and the car was packed, and we were ready to take off on our great college adventure.

And I was a basket case.

I did all right when we left my house. Chrissy came and packed me up first. But then Mr. C. and I helped her pack her stuff in the car, and it hit me that I was leaving, and he was staying, and there wasn’t going to be any more going over to Chrissy’s to see my best friend and, oh, by the way, get laid.

And I bawled, and that made Chrissy bawl. And I wanted one last time before we left. It was funny, because while I was being a complete little girl about it, begging him to take me to bed one last time, I remember thinking, “If he does it, I’m not going to let him use a condom!”

But of course he was the adult in the situation and didn’t carry me off to the bedroom for one last quick fuck, like would have happened in a romance novel.

I cried for twenty miles, until Chrissy yelled at me.

I admit that things were different enough, and exciting enough at college that I was distracted for a while. I was, in fact, distracted for almost an entire semester. It started when we found out they had screwed up and Chrissy was in a whole different dorm than I was. They couldn’t do anything about it, so we both had strangers for roommates.

That turned out to be less than a disaster, at least for me. My roommate was named Letisha, the first black person I had ever spent more than ten minutes with. We were a little wary of each other for a while, but that passed as we got to know each other and found out we had more in common than separated us. Chrissy got along with her roommate too, but we vowed to get things fixed by the next semester.

Chrissy, being beautiful, had guys all over her. She even liked a couple of them, but she had a rule about not dating anybody exclusively and she told every guy that. I had guys all over me too, but I was pretty sure it was just an attempt to get at my best friend through me.

There was one guy named Jack who was interesting. Part of that might have been because he was a Junior, and was a little older and a little more sophisticated than my Freshman classmates, who reminded me of high school guys. But college guys - especially juniors - weren’t into double dating, so I no longer had Chrissy to help me fend off the attentions of men on dates. And Jack had a silver tongue. More important, he didn’t seem at all interested in Chrissy. And he was a great kisser, and his hands felt good on me. And everything went fine until I decided to find out what a different man felt like inside me.

Jack, it seems, had an aversion to using condoms. Jack, it seems, expected me to be on the pill. And when I thought about how Mr. C. cared enough about me to insist on protection, and Jack kept saying “Come on, honey, you’ll love it and it will be okay,” I suddenly compared him to Mr. C. on a detailed level. Jack came away a very distant second place.

So I dumped Jack and threw myself into the books. I told myself that Mr. C. would reward me for good scholastic habits. Finals came and I did well. So when we went home for the Christmas break, I expected everything to be just like it was before we had left.

But it wasn’t.

Some things were the same. My parents treated me just like they had before I left. That meant just like I was still in high school.

I had Chrissy drop me off at home first, because we had agreed she got her father first. I was supposed to come over the next day.

But my parents couldn’t understand why, when I “lived with Chrissy” at college, I needed to spend any time with her at all during this precious time they had with me. My mother actually cried when I said I just needed to get out of the house for a while.

Obviously spending the night with Mr. C. was going to be difficult. Spending eight or ten nights with him wasn’t going to happen at all.

Oh sure, I could just go do it, but then my parents would get all parenty on me and who knew what would happen then. For all I knew they’d figure things out and then try to make trouble for Mr. C. I was eighteen by now, and technically I could do whatever I wanted, with whoever I wanted to do it. But those bridges, once burned, are a motherfucker to rebuild.

So weeks went by, while I sat at home evenings. Dad watched TV and Mom did her needle point and hummed. They didn’t actually do anything with me at all. They just wanted me there.

Finally I couldn’t take it any more. I got up and put on my coat.

“Where are you going, dear?” my mother asked.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

“Where?” she asked.

“Mother?” She looked at me over her reading glasses. “I’m a grown up now. I don’t have to tell you where I’m going.”

She looked startled, then miffed. “All right,” she said. “When will you be back?”

I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. “I don’t know,” I said. Then I left, before anyone could say anything else.

It was Chrissy’s car, so it was at her house. I had run or biked over to her place countless times over the past decade, and it had always seemed like a hop, skip and jump to their house. That night the distance seemed to have doubled or tripled.

When I got there my spirits picked up. The door was locked, so I rang the bell. Chrissy pulled the curtains apart and then smiled. She let me in, asking where in the world I’d been? I told her and she commiserated with me.

“Where is he?” I asked. I admit I asked eagerly.

“Oh Mal,” she said sadly. “He had some kind of business convention thing he had to go to. He won’t be back until day after tomorrow.”

My spirits sank again.

She took me into the kitchen and made me some hot chocolate.

We had lived for a semester in buildings two hundred feet apart. We went to each other’s rooms, and went out together too. But with classes, and work and social events, we hadn’t actually spent as much quality time together as we might have in the previous year. And Chrissy had gotten really chummy with a guy named Jesse, who was a nice guy. I liked him, but she spent a lot of time with him.

So this was the first time in a long time we’d had for extended time with each other.

Time in private.

We ended up in bed, of course.

It was just like old times. She was sweet and loving and appreciative. We went for two hours, having orgasm after unhurried orgasm together. While we were cuddling afterwards, she told me she’d let Jesse fuck her. More than once.

“Does your dad know?” I asked.

She nodded. “He says he’s happy for me.”

“Do you believe him?”

She nodded. “He got all tense about it until I showed him my birth control pills.”

“You bitch!” I half yelled. “You never told me you got on the pill!”

“I was afraid you’d yell at me,” she said. “I was afraid you’d look at it like I was cheating on Daddy.”

“You were cheating on him,” I said.

“I’m supposed to cheat on him,” she replied.

“Well I didn’t cheat on him,” I said. “And now he’s not even here to reward me for it.”

“You’re supposed to cheat on him too, Mal,” she said. “You know that.”

“So did he refuse to take you to bed?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she said. “He was very happy I’m on the pill. No more condoms.” She grinned.

“Why didn’t he just put you on the pill when you were sixteen?” I asked.

“He was resisting the whole sex thing,” she said. “He felt like if I was on the pill he’d give in completely. I honestly think that’s one reason why he started with you. He was trying to do less with me.”

“He only touched me twice a year,” I reminded her.

“He had more control with you than he did with me,” she agreed.

I looked at my watch. “I gotta go. My parents will call out the National Guard if I don’t show up soon.”

“He’s going to be really sad he missed you,” she said.

“Really?”

“He’s resisting the sex thing with you too, Mal,” she said. “But I know him. He wants you. He wants you like crazy.”

“I want him too,” I moaned.

“Maybe we can figure something out,” she said.

I had never read the last Harry Potter book, and my dad had it, so I threw myself into that the next few days. My tryst with Chrissy had taken the edge off my horniness, but I still fantasized about Hermione getting well fucked by various of her peers and teachers at Hogwarts. I felt so silly.

I volunteered to go do any chores that needed doing, which is why I was gone when the call came. I got back from the store with three quarters of a bag of groceries and my mom came to help me unpack the bag and put things away.