The following fictional story is being reposted by Mr Double.  If you are the author of this story and would like to receive proper recognition (an Author's Page at my website), contact me at mrdouble@ix.netcom.com.






From: sjr <73233.1411@CompuServe.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories
Subject: REP MJ05&06.TXT (m/F,teen) 157K 


             ****  WARNING  ****  WARNING  **** WARNING  ****

  THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL,
  EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND
  A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF
  10 YEARS.  IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON-
  FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS.  IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF
  SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN
  BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT.

  THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR.  SO--HEY, YOU CAN
  COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------

                THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE

                              by S.J.R.


                              PART 5A:


    1951.

    Summer.

    "Well," Lash LaRue said with his cocky grin, each hand perched
on one of two pearl-handled .45's at his side, "that takes care of
the McGraw Gang."

    "Sure does," said Fuzzy St. John, nodding and spitting a wad
of tobacco juice.

    Lash LaRue tipped his hat to the pretty gal in the calico
dress, who beamed at him admiringly from the wooden sidewalk.  Lash
LaRue cocked his cocky, self-assured head toward Fuzzy St. John.

    "Let's get goin', Fuzzy," Lash LaRue said, and he and Fuzzy
mounted their horses.

    Their steeds reared up.  Lash LaRue and Fuzzy spurred their
horses and galloped outta town.

    It was my ninth summer, pushing for my tenth year.

    Things had changed.  I knew it as I watched this absurdly out-
dated B-grade western for the third time, the first time being with
Uncle Johnny when I was five years old.  At ten I bid a fond but not
reluctant farewell to Lash LaRue and Tex Ritter and Roy Rogers.

    Martha Jane had graduated high school, on time and with high
grades.  She started college immediately that summer at the largest
of the local campuses, Memphis State.  She was determined to get her
teacher training in less than four years.  My mother dated almost
always on weekends, and since I spent every weekend with relatives,
no one was needed to overwatch me.  These were gray, uneventful days.
I got bored every fifteen seconds.

    Life had tragedy now.  It had dire consequences, uncertainty,
loneliness, nuclear warheads.  Left more often to my own devices by
my relatives on weekends, I searched the downtown movie houses for
an intensity of experience not found with the Bowery Boys or in Gene
Kelly musicals.  I would hit the Main Street cinemas as soon as they
opened at eleven A.M., my pockets jingling with the movie money with
which my relatives bribed me into conformity.  They assumed I was
watching Abbott and Costello or cowboys.  Instead, I sat tearfully
absorbed in more than a dozen showings of the archly romantic "Cyrano
de Bergerac".  I was fascinated with the impressionistic Technicolor
of "Moulin Rouge"; again and again I watched this moody film, empa-
thizing strongly with Lautrec's pitiful infirmity.

    My relatives, staunch stay-at-homes, had no idea these films
existed until I told them what I'd seen--and at that they seemed
bewildered as to why a boy would be so magnetically drawn to Bogart's
sarcasm, William Holden's cynicism, or Brando's hostility.  They were
amazed when I told them I had spent an entire day in the same movie
house watching over and over as a somber Robert Mitchum portrayed a
death-obsessed army officer in "G.I. Joe."

    I saw Martha Jane on our front porch once or twice in the early
summer.  By August she had disappeared.  Once I knocked on her
front door, expecting her mother to answer.  But no one did.  My
Mom didn't mention her.  It seemed Martha Jane had been swallowed
up into nowhere.  Knowing she was in summer classes, I assumed a
break would occur soon, probably in September.  But by September
I'd heard nothing.

    Associating with others had eroded my confidence.  My impression
was that other kids regarded me as a little weird; I had a fatalistic
attitude toward people and events.  Repression and criticism from Mom
and relatives didn't help.  By age ten, I was on a psychological downer.

    I began to expect that life would either take people away from me,
or me from them.  Stepper and Uncle Robert was a case in point;  Mom
and all the dead of the war were others.  When the Korean War started,
Josephine Louise's dad, my Uncle Lawrence, was called back to active
service.  He paid us a farewell visit in the early Fall.  He smiled
and saluted me when he left our house, bound for Fort Hood, Texas.
By October he was killed in action.

    My future step-dad had little interest in my activities.  His
name was Anthony.  Mom called him Tony.  He was a dark-haired,
virile, handsome man.  I disliked him somewhat; he had a deep and
relatively loud voice, very different from the softer voices of all
the aunts around me, different from the breathy Italian quality of
Uncle Johnny and Josephine Louise.  By the end of that summer
Tony started hanging around our apartment more often.  He came over
many mornings before opening the supermarket in our neighborhood
and had breakfast with Mom and me while I prepared for school.  Our
interests never interlocked.  He assumed I was interested in sports,
in being a fireman or doctor when I grew up, in playing with other
boys.  When he found out I wanted to be an artist, he was taken
aback.  His idea of art was limited to portraits of the saints.

    One morning at breakfast as I ate my milk and oatmeal, he sat
at the other side of our tiny kitchen table, reading a newspaper
article to my mother who was working at the sink.  He was mildly
agitated about a report on small business regulation.  He read until
he came to a word in the article that made him stop.

    "What is that word?" he asked irritably, squinting at the page.
"Why do they have to use words this long in newspapers?"

    "Ask Speedy," Mom said, so he handed me the paper and pointed
at the word.  "What's that word say?" he asked me.

    Chewing oatmeal, I glanced at the word quickly and announced,
"Antiestablishmentarianism."

    He sat back in amazement.  "Well, damn," he breathed.  "How'd
he know a big word like that?"

    "I don't know," Mom answered absently.  "He just does.  I
think his Uncle Johnny taught him to read from the comics."

    "The comics?" he echoed, dumbfounded.  He reached for his
coffee cup.  "Damn," he breathed again.

    In my isolation, movies became my life.  I devoured them like
popcorn and soda.  I saw three or four films each weekend.  If new
ones hadn't opened I'd frequent the rerun joints and the art film
outlets.  My relatives didn't mind, as it kept me out of their hair
all weekend, didn't cost much for a child's admission (twelve cents
in those days), and Uncle Johnny was getting a little too old and
arthritic to escort me all over town the way he did when I was
younger.

    Truly, I enjoyed the freedom of doing mostly as I pleased.
They knew I was smart enough to find my way around town; most of
the movies were a short walk from the restaurant.  But the art film
outlet was far out in the eastern part of town.  With my usual
brazenness I allowed folks to assume that I never traveled that far
out of the way.  But one Saturday I took the No.10 bus all the way
to the Ritz theater to see "Cyrano de Bergerac."  I was so affected
by the film that I stayed inside and watched it again, then again,
then a fourth time.  The movie was longer than most, so that when
I left the theater I discovered I was just in time to catch the last
inbound No.10, which stopped running by ten PM.

    It was nearly eleven when I arrived at Aunt Frances' house and
let myself in.  Entering by the long unlit front hallway, I assumed
everyone was asleep.  But Aunt Frances was waiting up for me
in her long white nightgown on the living room sofa.

    "Where the hell have *you* been?" she demanded as I walked
into the room.

    I knew from long experience that the best tactic for handling
Aunt Frances under these circumstances was to appear unfazed and
keep on grinning.

    "The movies," I answered.

    "You trying to give your Aunt Frances a heart attack?  Huh?
You want your poor old Aunt Frances to have a heart attack?  What
kind of movie they let you into that lasts till this time of night?"

    "Cyrano de Bergerac," I said.

    "Syrup what?"  She squinted hard.

    "Cyrano de Bergerac," I repeated.  I sat sideways on one of
the ornate dining chairs in the room and slipped my arm around
the back of the chair.  I smiled and batted my eyelids.

    "Don't give me that look.  What kinda movie is this, uh,
Cereal di Hajiback?"

    "It's French."

    "It's what?  It's fresh?"

    "French, Aunt Frances.  French."

    We both looked up as Uncle Johnny appeared in the doorway
leading to the bedrooms.  His hair mussed, his eyes squinting
in the light, he scratched his tummy over his pajamas.

    Aunt Frances huffed, "Look, Johnny.  He walks in like nothing
happened.  You see him, Johnny?  Look at him."

    "You home?" Uncle Johnny mumbled drowsily.

    "I'm here, "  I said.  "I'm okay."

    "It's late, Speedy,"  Uncle Johnny said.

    "I know."

    "You okay?  We were all worried about ya."

    "I'm fine."

    "Have any trouble?"

    "Nope."

    He yawned.  "How'd you get here this time of night?  Walk?"

    "The Number 10 Bus."

    "Oh."  He yawned again.  "Well, you be careful out there.  You
oughtta call us next time."  Another yawn.  "Good night, Frances."
He walked back into the dark.

    "That's all you have to say?" Aunt Frances called after him.

    "Good night, Frances," Uncle Johnny said, disappearing.

    "I'll be damn," she muttered, settling back into the sofa.
"Two of a kind, you two.  Listen, you're too young to be watchin'
French movies at eleven o'clock at night."

    "How old do I have to be?"

    "Seven years old is too young!"

    "I'm not seven years old, Aunt Frances, I'm ten."

    "Ten?  You ain't no ten years old.  What kinda movie is this?
Is Clark Gable in this movie?"

    "No.  Jose Ferrer."

    "Who?"

    "Jose Ferrer."

    "Never heard of him."

    I leaned forward and peered at her.  "Aunt Frances, are you
sure you're not asleep?"

    "Of course I'm not asleep.  I look asleep?"

    "Well, the things you're asking and saying to me don't make
much sense."

    "How'm I supposed to make sense with you talking French, or
whatever it is?"

    I rose from the chair and bent down to her and kissed her on
the cheek--a surefire technique for calming her down.  Poor Aunt
Frances, who had not been anywhere except to work and church and
bed since the 1920's, had no idea how the world had changed.

    "You think you're gonna kiss your Aunt Frances and that's all
you hafta do?"

    "I just don't want you to be worried."

    "You look just like your poor daddy when you do that.  You
love your Aunt Frances?"

    "Yes, ma'am, I sure do.  You're my favorite."  I kissed her
again.  "Now you ought to go back to bed.  I'm all right."

    "You think you're smart, don't ya?  That's what your daddy
used to do.  You love your Aunt Frances like your daddy did?"

    "I sure do," I cooed, knowing I had her in the palm of my hand.

    "Okay, then" she said, blushing childishly.  She looked up at
me with her big round confused eyes, as if trying to comprehend how
the universe had become what it was without her knowing.  It had
taken me years to fathom this hysterical woman.  I had learned, with
coaching from Josephine Louise, that Aunt Frances had not been all
there since my father's death.  A couple of years before, I would
not have been able to understand it.  Now, after many weekends, I
realized that her thoughts and feelings were stuck at a single
moment in time and would go neither backward nor ahead.

    "You look just like your daddy," she said wistfully, looking
at me and seeing someone else.  Then she scowled mildly and said,
"You don't do that to me and your Uncle Johnny any more.  You
hear me?"

    "Yes, ma'am," I said, sweetly.

    "Your Uncle Johnny loves you too.  You know that, don't you?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    "We don't want anything to happen to you, like what happened to
your daddy."

    "I know," I said gently.  "Now," I began, standing up and holding
her hand.  "I'm gonna go to sleep, and you go back to sleep too."

    "You love your Aunt Frances?"

    I bent down and kissed her again.  "I sure do."

    With that, she was satisfied and sloughed off in her fluffy
houseshoes to her bedroom.  For a while I sat in the living room,
breathing a long sigh of relief.  I asked myself, seriously, if I
would ever again find someone with whom I could communicate without
the need for these convoluted tactics.  Trying to follow Aunt Frances'
line of thought was like working one's way through a trick maze or a
hall of mirrors.

    When I stayed with them I slept in the front bedroom with my Aunt
Frances' mother, my great-grandmother Nifa.  She was, everyone esti-
mated at that time, in her nineties.  She wore black.  She wore a
simple black dress and black shoes and black hose all day long, and
she wore a black nightgown and long black stockings when she slept.
She had worn nothing but black since her husband's death in 1936.  She
spoke no English, only a Northern Italian dialect that other Italians
found difficult.  Speaking with Nifa was similar to speaking with Aunt
Frances; their minds were elsewhere, their words and memories and
thoughts had not changed over many years.  Being among them was to be
among memories of loved ones never seen and long since gone, of time
long since past and silenced.  It was a lonely experience, like
talking to the blind and deaf, who could neither hear nor see me.

    Somehow I had learned to understand, pity and love these lost
souls.  I may not have known what they thought (no one did), but
I somehow knew what they felt.

    But as for me, by the summer of 1952 I didn't see a soul-mate
in sight.  Not anywhere.

    Late that Fall I did have one baby-sitter when my Mom had a
rare weeknight date.  The sitter was none other than Evelyn,
Martha Jane's sister.

    Evelyn spent almost the entire night on the phone.  She was
working days at a clerical job and attending the University of
Tennessee Medical Extension at night, studying for work in medical
research.  She was an attractive woman in her middle twenties now,
tall, rather chic and long-legged.  Only in her eyes and general
posture did she resemble her sister.  Objectively, most people would
have thought Evelyn to be more beautiful: she was brunette and had a
svelte, sophisticated air, with a lazy voice and large dark eyes and
high cheekbones.  But being among young women other than Martha Jane,
which didn't happen often, taught me something about my own needs--
Evelyn, though sexy, did not appeal to me at all.  I found her nice
to look at, friendly, and boring.  I was beginning to learn the vast
difference between just any "good-looking woman" and one who has a
compelling, irrestible, unsettling appeal.  At that point I could
be brought under the spell of only two females on the planet: the
physically devastating Josephine Louise, and the warm, captivating,
and equally devastating Martha Jane.

    Evelyn told me that night that she was herself so busy with
career and friends (she admitted she had no steady man and was tied
to her work), she seldom spoke with her mother or Martha Jane.  But
she offered me the last phone number she had for her, an apartment
somewhere near Memphis State that Martha Jane shared with two other
students.  I was certain Martha Jane must have found a boyfriend by
then and had little time for anything except school.  Evelyn also
told me she last saw her sister for lunch in downtown Memphis at
Woolworth's, where Martha Jane worked part-time.  She was 19 now,
"busy as a busy little bee."  Evelyn promised that when she contacted
Martha Jane again she'd ask her to give me a call.

    I missed Martha Jane.  I missed her sexually, of course, but
at that age sex was still secondary.  Mainly, I missed just her,
her warmth and the ease of simply being with her.  At age ten I saw
her as a sexual object much more clearly than I had a few years
earlier, though I still had a while to go before the full impact of
sexual attraction hit home.  At that point I wanted the
sisterly, motherly, girl-woman of her more emotionally and intel-
lectually than physically.

    As soon as I could I dialed the number Evelyn had given me.  No
go.  A young girl answered and said that Martha Jane shared a place
with them but that she had moved again and they didn't know where.
Besides that call, I had no idea what happened to Evelyn's promise
that she would have Martha Jane call me.

    That left me with the part-time job at Woolworth's.  On impulse
I went to find her on a Saturday afternoon one weekend when I was
staying at the downtown restaurant.  It was warm weather, right
around my 11th birthday.

    Telling my folks I was going to a movie, I took a bus down to
the end of Main Street and went straight to the big three-story
Woolworth's.  Once inside, I had no idea where to look.  It was a
huge store, especially to an 11-year-old.  I searched the whole
place, checked at every sales counter, roamed through every
aisle.

    After a while I gave up and stood outside on the busy sidewalk.
I thought that perhaps it was her lunch hour, or perhaps she came to
work later in the day.  Since I had movie money, I went to a movie
nearby and feasted on a lunch of popcorn and Coke.  By then it was
after two, so I went back to Woolworth's.

    The second search proved futile as well.  She was nowhere to be
found.  Despite my aggressive, snoopy attitude in so many other
areas, I seem to have lost all my "fight" in this situation.  I wan-
dered aisle to aisle, feeling dejected and lost.  I walked around the
waterfront area for a while, then up and down Main Street several
times.  By then it was 4:00.  I returned to the store.  It was crowded
nose-to-nose with Saturday shoppers.  After yet another hour
of searching, I had not found her and it was near closing time.

    I asked some salespeople if they knew Martha Jane Graham.  They
didn't.  Puzzled, I thought about hanging around and asking every
employee I could find, but everyone was preparing to close for the
day.  I asked one more worker if they had a personnel department.
They did, but it was closed Saturdays.  She referred me to a sales
counter where she thought Martha Jane worked.

    But when I arrived there, I found only a redheaded middle-aged
lady who didn't look anything like her and wasn't particularly
interested in helping me find my way.  She eyed me suspiciously.
"You have parents?" she asked, frowning.  "Where are your parents?
You shouldn't be here all by yourself, we're getting ready to close."

    I felt odd and disoriented.  The whole situation was becoming
eerie, dreamlike.  The redhead now confronted me with the fact that
I was still only 11.  Aggressive and independent though I might have
been at that age, and though I was an 11-year-old kid who in many
ways didn't act or think like an 11-year-old--yet I was, nevertheless,
still a kid.  Perhaps it was a feeling of frustration: if I were not
such a kid, I thought, these people would take me seriously and give
me the information I was looking for.  And if I did find Martha Jane
wouldn't she, like Evelyn and the redhead and everyone else, notice
that I was not an adult?  Had something changed, such that now she
would recognize me for who I really was?  And besides, she probably
had a boyfriend now; she was among college students her own age at a
big coed state college.

     The day had such a strange effect on me that I was in its grip
for months.  I soon became fearful that Martha Jane would not want
to see me again, as least not as she had seen me before.  She was
in a different world now.  Effectively, she had left the project and
in leaving the project she had somehow changed everything.  I began
to feel she was "too old" for me now.

    When I went home after that weekend I mentioned Saturday's search
to my Mom, but she was unconcerned.  Paranoically, I didn't trust
her as someone I wanted to talk to about Martha Jane, not in any way.
She might want to know why I was so desperate to find her, she might
suspect something was going on--especially since Martha Jane had not
been around for more than a year.  I didn't mention it to her again,
and sulked around our apartment for most of that week.

    One day several weeks later when I came home from school, Mom said
Martha Jane had called and asked how I was getting along.

    The first thing I asked was, "Did you get a number to call back?"

    Mom shrugged. "Well, no, I didn't think it was important anymore.
You haven't mentioned her in so long..."

    I didn't hear the rest of what she said.  I felt as if I had
fallen from a high place and landed on my face.  I didn't want to
betray my feelings, so I said nothing more.  I didn't even know what
my feelings were.

    As I approached and then reached twelve years, I became involved
in that strange activity in grammar schools known as "dramatics,"
which consumed my energy and my thoughts.  Because I had gleaned from
movies so much about effective acting, I became very successful at
it.  The more successful I was, the harder I worked.  Though I had no
close relationships among my peers and teachers at the newly built St.
Michael's School, I did find a source of attention and recognition on
the stage.  Being in a new school in a different part of town made me
feel that I, too, had started the process of moving out of the
project.  By the time the thirty-minute bus ride to St. Michael's
ended each morning, I had readjusted to an entirely different place; I
felt almost as if I were spending those five hours a day in a
different town.

    Then came the day my Mom announced she would be getting married
and that we'd soon be moving out of the project.  That day, Martha
Jane seemed to disappear for good.  I made it so.  I went into our
bedroom the night of Mom's announcement and saw the moonlight on the
window sill.  And I forced Martha Jane out of my mind.


                             PART 5B:


    In December 1953 my Mom married and my stepfather moved into
the apartment temporarily while they searched for a new house.  The
ceremony was little more than a small tea party in a room in the
reception house at St. Mary's Church.  This being my mother's second
marriage, she didn't think a large wedding would be appropriate, and
my conservative step-dad agreed.  They took over the old bedroom,
and I slept on the pullout sofa in the living room (which, I did not
realize until that time, had a bed inside it!).

    Problems with finding a new home caused them to postpone their
honeymoon.  But near Easter, 1954, they announced that a house had
been found and purchased, and before moving in they were going to
take their honeymoon week in St. Louis.  The concept of a honeymoon
was rather a vague one for me.  Mom said it was just a "vacation"

people take when they marry (even with my limited knowledge of the
marriage state, I knew better than that!  My relationship with Mom
certainly had not improved).

    I came home from school one day shortly afterward, on the last
day before the start of the Easter school holidays.  There in the
kitchen with my mother sat Martha Jane, sipping coffee and chatting
merrily away.

    "Well, Hi!" she said as my eyes bulged out of my head.

    I could tell--immediately--that her Southern accent had only
thickened.  It was still the same musical voice, a bit rambunctious
now, a little louder and more confident.  But the same eyes; a more
slender neck and arms, and definitely an older and more adult figure.
She was 20.  Her hair was the same, maybe a little more blonde.

    "Well, hotshot, are you going to speak?"

    I did, but don't remember what I said.  I was numbstruck.  It
was Martha Jane but it wasn't Martha Jane.  It was the same person
but it wasn't.  She was not a teenager anymore.  And she smoked
cigarettes.  One dangled lazily from her finger as she sat cross-
legged at the kitchen table with Mom.

    "Say hello to Martha Jane," Mom said, and laughed.  "You
forget about her already?"

    "I did say hello, didn't I?" I asked, dazed.  They both shook
their heads and waited for me, amused.  I said falteringly, "Well,
then, uh--"  I shrugged helplessly-- "Hi."

    Martha Jane rose from the chair.  "Oh, what kind of welcome
is that?"  She walked across the room--on noisy high-heeled
shoes! --and came straight to me, moving the cigarette from one
hand to another so she would be able to give a great big hug
without burning me with the thing.  I was grateful for the hug.
Deeply grateful.  But my feelings were so firmly entrenched, espe-
cially when I was around my mother, that I denied myself the luxury
of any response at all.

    "Let me look at YOU!" Martha Jane exclaimed.  "You're only an
inch taller than me now!  Can't you grow any faster than that?"

    I shrugged and blushed.  "I'm only 12 years old," I said.

    "Well, that won't last forever, hon, don't worry."  She took
my hand and leaned closer to me.  "How are you, Speedy?  Did you
forget all about me, after all I had to put up with from you?"

    "I didn't forget," I smiled.  I was overcome by a blush attack
that I strongly resisted.  She saw my problem, and immediately she
gave a sympathetic "Aawwww, c'mere,"  and putting her arms around
me she gave a stronger, more affectionate hug.

    "How are you, hon?  I haven't seen you in so long."

    I saw my mother watching us, pleased.  But not trusting myself,
I pulled back and simply gave Martha Jane an appreciative nod.

    My mother announced: "Martha Jane lost her job."

    Martha Jane shrugged.  "Laid off, hon."  She shrugged.  "What
the heck!  At least I'm still getting the GI Bill money because
of my father.  All I have to say is, 'Thank you, Uncle Sam!'"

    My Mom went on, greatly amused.  "Martha Jane showed up just in
time.  While your daddy and I are in St. Louis on our honeymoon next
week, your Aunt Yvonne was supposed to drop by here and check up
once a while so you wouldn't be here all by yourself.  Well, guess
who showed up just in time to take her place?"

    I didn't answer.  I was afraid to.

    My mother nudged her head toward Martha Jane.  "Your old
neighbor over there."

    I looked at Martha Jane.

    She pointed her thumb at herself.  "The old supervisor herself,
honey.  Yvonne got fired, I got hired.  Gonna be next store again
anyway, so why should she have to traipse all the way over here?"
She moved closer to me again and pointed a finger into my chest.
"Gonna be checkin' on you, buster.  Better clean up your act."

    My act, considering how little I revealed of myself at that
instant, couldn't have been more antiseptic.  My feelings were
jumbled.  She didn't seem the same.  She moved and spoke with an
aggressiveness I found difficult to accept.  Nor was it so easy for
me to switch emotional gears after two years of not seeing her,
having spent that time surrounded by people in whom I had so little
trust emotionally.

    The next day, a Saturday, Mom and my new dad left Union Station
for their honeymoon.  At the grandiose Victorian building a number
of people were present to see them off.  Most of them were my step-
dad's folks.  They were friendly, earthy people,  But the thought of
the sheer size of his family was intimidating: he alone had fourteen
brothers and sisters.  The day he married my mother, I gained over
three hundred new cousins and an undetermined number of uncles and
aunts.  I had yet to meet most of them, a task I estimated would
take years.

    I spent Saturday with my grandparents, the Ricci's.  Grandpa
Joe Ricci, my father's father, packed me into his Oldsmobile on
Sunday morning to give me a ride back to the project.

    As he drove he griped, "Don't see why you can't spend the rest
of the week with me and your Grandma Rose."

    "I have too many things to do at home, Grandpa Joe.  I got a
dozen library books over there to go through while my Mama and
Daddy are gone."

    "Your 'Daddy'!"  Grandpa Joe swore mildly in his slightly
gravelly voice.  "He ain't your daddy.  Your daddy was Steven
Joseph, Senior.  And he's dead."

    "My step-daddy, then."

    "That's better."

    I didn't know if I really wanted to see Martha Jane or not.  She
called from a friend's place and told me she was packing the last of
her things to move back to the project, then she had to change and
go to a funeral.  She said she would be job hunting all day Monday.
But she'd come over tonight, Sunday, and the next night as well, and
fix dinner for me.  I was on Easter vacation, a dubious advantage of
being in a Catholic grammar school.  I had no friends and nothing I
particularly wanted to do.  I spent most of Sunday rummaging around
the apartment, which seemed relatively large with no one home but
me. Over the years I had spent so much time alone that I began to
realize and appreciate that it did have certain advantages:  I had
absolute freedom of movement, and freedom from being hassled by the
foibles and demands of others.

    But as Sunday evening neared, I was considering whether or not
to be home at the time Martha Jane was due to fix dinner.  I did
not trust my feelings at all.  I could always hop a bus and go back
to my godparents or grandparents for the whole week...

    In my mind she had changed.  She was not the primal, simple child
I knew.  She wore high heels.  She smoked.  She talked loud.

    She showed up shortly before six.  She greeted me with a hug, and
when she saw I appeared numb she insisted that I give her cheek a
hello kiss, after which she set her purse down on a table in the liv-
ing room and went into the kitchen to make dinner.

    I stared at her purse.  It was one of the slick black patent
leather purses that adult women carried around.  It seemed she moved
faster, too, or maybe it was an illusion created by her seemingly
longer legs and the heels.  From the kitchen she asked what I wanted
to eat.  I told her I didn't care.  As she prepared to cook in that
tiny kitchen with the obsolete refrigerator and the two-burner gas
stove, she kept joking and seemed in fine humor.

    "Won't you be tickled pink to get out of this tiny place and
into that big house out on Macon Road?  Got a nice big kitchen in
there, I saw it.  Your mom drove me out there last week."

    "Last week?" I asked, confused.  I didn't know she had been
around for almost a whole week before seeing me.

    "Yes, hon, last weekend, you know?  I *missed* you, I asked
them where you were, and you were at your grandmother's all
weekend."

    "My mom didn't call me,"  I muttered.  Betrayed by mom again!

    "Well, she couldn't, I couldn't stay long anyway.  Rent Overdue,
Speedy, I had to move out of that apartment.  Heck, I sure collected
a ton of junk in there."  She was setting the table but she stopped
to grin at me.  "You're gonna love that house.  It's new, all *new*,
not a scratch on it!  Even the grass is new.  And three bedrooms,
hon.  See this?"  She held up three fingers.  "Three bedrooms!
You'll have your own room, and to heck with that sofabed in there."

    I was not overly pleased.  "I guess it'll be okay," I muttered,
moving to take my seat at the small table.  "I could learn to like
it."

    She came over to me.  She bent down.  I became very aware of her
breasts--not her pert teengirl titties, but her adult female breasts
under the white blouse and under the white bra.  She hugged me from
one side and her voice softened.  She said earnestly, "You need your
own room, hon.  You need your...own..room."  She emphasized the last
three words.  She pulled back and looked at me.  "My lord!  How old
are you now, about forty-five?"

    "Umpteen," I answered blandly.

    She laughed.  "Does it really feel that way?"

    "And you?" I asked as she sat in the chair before me.

    "Umpteen," she answered, giving a muffled laugh. "Closer to
twenty, really.  Speedy, you look wonderful.  You're getting so cute.
I thought you'd be a little taller, though.  Don't you eat your
spinach?"

    I didn't answer.

    "You look like your daddy's picture."

    "I know,"  I said.

    "Bet every aunt and uncle you know tells you that at least once
every fifteen minutes, don't they?"

    "Yep," I said, aware of the dull tone in my voice.

    "Not everybody that flew a B-17 won a Silver Star, hon."  She
chewed her food and swallowed, and her face and voice became more
serious, more leveled.  "Doesn't mean you have to win a Silver
Star too, Speedy."

    I didn't know what to say to her.  I didn't know exactly what
she meant, but I did feel that she knew so very much more about
me than I did.

    She said, with a mouth half full of spinach, "You didn't say
you missed me."

    "Well," I said, "I did.  I'm not as talkative as I used to be."

    "Tell me something I hadn't noticed," she chuckled.  "You don't
smile as much, either.  Of course, you also don't clown or blush or
shuffle around.  Those are improvements, anyway.  You're getting to
be too nice-looking a young man to be that painfully shy.  You're
growin' up.  Guess we all have to grow up sooner or later."

    "I guess."

    "So how do you like it?"

    "Like what?" I asked.

    "This growing-up business."

    "It's okay."

    "Holy smokes, what an answer."  She shook her head.  "You're
right, it's not all it's cracked up to be."  Then she changed the
subject.  "I'm going out right after we eat dinner, I might buy a
used typewriter from somebody across the driveway.  I really need
one."

    "I have a typewriter," I offered.

    "The old Underwood?  No, Speedy, you need that.  I need a small
one.  Portable."  She chewed her food quickly and checked her wrist
watch.  "But I'll be back later, about eight or eight-thirty."

    I swallowed.  "Okay."

    She would eat, chew, look at me, eat, and chew.  Then look at me.
She went rapidly from one subject to another.  She sounded like one of
my curious aunts.  But her constant effort at searching me out left me
feeling that she was almost as uncomfortable as I was.

    She left after dinner.  I sat and played with the Philco, going
from one radio show to the next.  Bored, I took a bath.  I got all
dressed again in jeans and a plaid shirt and sat listening to the
records and going through the record albums.  Just before 8:30,
Martha Jane showed up.  She looked tired now, and didn't move around
as quickly.  She plopped down on the sofa and gave a loud moan.
"Whew!  How are you, hon?"

    I ignored her question.  "How's your typewriter?"

    "I just left it at home, next door.  It'll do."   She slumped
into the cushions and caught her breath.  She used each foot to
push the high heels off.  "I hate these!  Hate, hate, hate."

    "They make a lot of noise when you walk."

    "Yeah, don't they?"

    She looked at me for a long time.  "What's the matter, hon?
Do you just go off into nowhere when you get to be 12 years old?
It is 12 now, isn't it?"

    "It's 12," I said, not looking up from the records.  I sighed.
"Just tired, I guess."

    "Your mom and your brand-new daddy won't be back until next
Friday night.  So you can make as big a mess as you want, you're
getting too old for a baby-sitter.  But I'll check in.  Just be
sure to clean the place up before mommy and daddy day on Friday."

    "He's not my daddy," I said flatly, not looking up from the
album.

    "Of course he's your daddy.  What do you mean?"

    "My daddy's dead," I said without emotion, recalling Grandpa
Joe.

    "Speedy...what a morbid thing to say."

    "That's what Grandpa Joe told me to say."

    "I met your Grandpa Joe and he's a very nice man who's done a
lot for you and your mom.  But he's an unhappy man who lives in
the past and likes to make others think the same way he does.  You
have to mind him and do as he says, but he doesn't have to tell
you how to think."

    "Okay," I said, paging the record album.

    For a long minute she didn't say anything.  I could feel her,
above and behind me, looking at me from the sofa.  In a moment she
said, "Would you like to go to a movie with me this week?  I mean,
what are you gonna do all week?"

    I looked up at her, rather blankly.  "Okay," I said.  "I
like movies, I know every inch of every theater in Memphis."

    "Oh, yes?  You must spend a lot of time there."

    "Every weekend."

    She moved from the sofa and sat down on the floor next to me.
She began removing bobby pins from her hair.  "You still spend a
lot of time alone, don't you?  That hasn't changed, has it?"

    "No," I said.

    She leaned toward me.  "Give me your face," she said.

    I leaned toward her.  She kissed my two eyes, lightly, and
then my nose.  "I've been running around like a chicken with my
head cut off since six o'clock this morning.  Do you promise not
to run away from home while I take a bath?"

    "I promise," I said.

    She studied me, her face close to mine.  She put an arm around
my shoulder.  She smiled.  "What's been happening to you?"

    I looked at her and asked, coldly casual, "You have a boyfriend
yet?"

    Her grin disappeared.  "Yes," she said.  After a pause, she
added.  "He's a schmuck.  You know what a schmuck is?"

    I shook my head.

    She leaned back on her ankles and took out one more bobby pin.
"It's some kind of Jewish word, I think.  From my New York.  A gal
from New York who's in one of my classes keeps using that word."

    "What's a schmuck?"  I asked.

    "A schmuck," she said slowly and distinctly, "is...a...schmuck!
A creep.  A jerk."  She shook her head.  "You'll figure it out."
Then she said firmly, "Being a schmuck is what your Grandpa Joe was
being when he said that horrible thing about your daddy."

    She got up and kissed me on the forehead.  "I'll be back.
Stay here."

    Into the bathroom she went.  She was in there for quite a
long time, bathing away.  I was getting sleepy and started putting
the records away.  It was not so bad, I thought.  She does slow
down after a while, and obviously she was warming up to me like
a long-lost friend.  She wasn't *that* old, certainly.  Not *that*
different.  Obviously we were still buddies.  But she had a
boyfriend!

    A little voice in me said: of course she has a boyfriend,
stupid.  She's twenty years old.  When you're twenty years old,

you can have a girlfriend.  She deserves to have a boyfriend.

    I put away the record album, sat on the floor, and watched
the closed bathroom door.  Water running furiously in there.
No change in the way she kept herself, she always hated being
clammy or sweaty.

    During the rest of her stay behind the door I worked up the
courage to apologize.  I stood waiting in the middle of the living
room with my hands in my pockets.  I still had my pride, of course.
I didn't want to seem as dejected and desolate as I really was,
that would be giving too much away.

    I heard the bathroom door open, saw the light go out.  She came
into the doorway of the living room.  She was in light pink, floppy
silk pajamas.  She was drying her hair with a towel and saw me
standing with my hands still in my pockets.

    She asked, "What are doing, just standing there?"

    I asked, "Is a schmuck just being rude, or a party pooper, and
stuff like that?"

    "Yes, I'd say...that qualifies as fairly schmuck-like."  She
fluffed her head with the towel.

    "Is it, like...being snotty?"

    "Yep."

    I searched for words a second.  "Acting like you're always
right and everybody else is wrong?"

    "Yep."

    "...like...the way I was acting today?"

    "Yep.  That's a schmuck, all right."

    "So I was bein' a schmuck."

    "That's one of a great many things that schmucks do."  She put
away the towel and came to me and grabbed me by the hand, leading
me toward the bedroom.  "C'mon.  Beddy-bye.  It's ten o'clock."

    I resisted.  "I thought this was supposed to be a vacation!"

    "A vacation doesn't mean you stay up all night.  Anyway, young
man--my young schmuck--you've been pretty cranky all day, and if you
want to have a good time with me this week and keep up with me, you
better rest while you can."

    I stood near the bed as she rapidly pulled back the bedclothes.

    "Okay, okay, but I *am* twelve years old.  I can get myself in and
out of the bed."

    "Right," she said.  "Well, you're not all that old.  Besides,
I want to ask you about something before you turn in."  She came
to me and began removing my shirt.  "Your mother told me, schmuck,
that you went to Woolworth's looking for me one day and you
couldn't find me."

    "She told you that?  Here, I can unbutton my shirt myself.
Is a schmuck somebody who can't unbutton their own shirt, too?"

    She stood eyeing me sternly with her hands on her hips.

    "Anyway," I said, "that was months ago."

    She nodded.  "She told me.  She said you were very disappointed.
She said you were down in the dumps.  All...day...long."

    "Sure, I was disappointed.  What's wrong with being disap-
pointed?"

    "No no no, schmuck.  Not just disappointed.  She said you were
down in the dumps for a week."

    I raised my eyes to the ceiling.  Didn't mothers know when to
shut up?  I removed my shirt and started on my jeans, not saying
anything, avoiding her gaze.

    "It so happens," she continued, "I wasn't there that day.  So
was she correct about that?  What's your version of the story?"

    I blushed.  I made a what-the-hell shrug.  She started to help
me with the belt.  "Look," I said, "I can do this."

    She stepped back.  "Okay.  Take charge.  But get into bed.
It's late."

    "I thought I could just stay up all week.  It's Easter vaca-
tion."

    She eyed me with a comic, bugeyed sternness, firmed her lips,
and pointed dramatically at the bed.

    I did an aw-shucks and got down to my underwear.  I was taller
and more developed than I was when I had last seen her.  I had a
little hair on my legs, not much, but visible.  I also had under
my jockeys a healthily burgeoning patch of pubic hair that had
replaced the light blond fuzz and which, I suddenly realized, might
be dimly visible through the thin cloth.  Hurrying into bed, I also
realized with even greater embarrassment that I had developed in
another area as well, which must surely have been noticeable, not
as the thimble-shaped white bulb near the slit of my jockeys that
she had seen in the past, but as a definitely larger and more
shapeless bulge.

    Quickly, I lay on my side and pulled the sheet to my waist.

    Looking officially satisfied, she reached to turn out the bed-
side lamp.  But instead, she changed her mind.  Leaving the light
on, she got into bed with me and shoved me farther to the other side.
She lay next to me, facing me, on her side with her head propped on
one arm.

    "Wanna talk?" she asked.



                                PART 5C:


    I shrugged.

    "I mean, seriously.  Talk."

    I shrugged again.  "Not really."

    "I do," she persisted.

    So I got into the same pose as she, propped on one elbow and facing
her.  "All right, but I don't need a baby-sitter to put me to bed."

    "I don't know what to do with you.  About you.  You are spoiled
and too independent.  I know you don't like all your fussy old aunts
and uncles so much, but you have to admit they spoiled the heck out of
you.  And, brother, did I help!  You are so strange. In so many ways
you're older than me, in the ways you connect with certain things
inside people, but...such a strange boy."

    "Boy," I echoed dryly.

    "Well, Speedy, you *are* a boy...No, no, no, you are what looks like
a boy, you do boy things, you have boy habits.  But you're not really a
boy.  Wars took your boy away from you.  I did, too.  I'm going to die
and go to hell for it."

    I gruffed, "Oh, That's what the nuns say all the time..."

    "Do you know what I mean when I say I'm going to hell for it?"

    "...and you say that all the time, too."

    "I know, but do you know what I mean?"

    "I guess.  No."

    "I'm in hell for it now, Speedy.  I'm in hell every day thinking
about this and about us."

    "You mean...'this' and 'us' being...?"

    She mouthed the word s-e-x, and nodded.

    I felt a crashing, cutting disappointment.  All I could say
was: "Oh."

    "I think what we did together was very unusual.  Very out of
control.  I don't think I will ever be able to be like that with anyone
else again, as long as I live."

    "I didn't know you felt so bad about it."

    "No no no no no, not 'bad'," she moaned, beating her fists lightly
on the bedsheet.  "Not 'bad'!"  She beat her fist again, once for each
word: "You...don't...understand."

    "Explain it to me."

    "I am explaining it to you!"

    "Okay."

    "You don't understand that...I...that I *did* like it.  I liked it
more than anything.  I'm trying to tell you that I...that I know, looking
at you right here and now, that I know I'll never be able to do that with
anyone else."

    "Not--?"

    She stopped me.  "Not even with my boyfriend."

    "Hm."

    "Believe me?"

    I shrugged: a sort of, a maybe.

    "I'm trying to tell you, Speedy, my dear sweet little man, my somehow
grownup somehow not grownup little man--Oh, my my you are so grownup in
bed.  You are so strange.  I'm trying to tell you that...I liked it...
But...I'm afraid of you.  I'm afraid of myself.  You do something to me,
we have something, we do something to each other that--"  She stopped.
"Yes, I have this boyfriend but it's not the same, it's not--"  She
stopped again and sighed almost tearfully.  "Oh, heck!"

    "You think it was wrong?" I guessed.

    She shook her head no, impatiently dismissing my question. Then she
sighed.  "I have this problem."

    "Problem?"

    "Yes."  She pulled a wet strand from her hair and then picked a
little crumb of something off her tongue and couldn't find it again and
just gave up.  "The problem is...I still remember it."

    "Oh."

    "Yes, 'Oh'.  I remember, and I--ah, this is so complicated."

    I sat up.  In some ways this was beyond me.  In some other strange
way, I sensed what she was saying.  "Maybe we should not have done it."

    She looked suddenly and deeply into my eyes.  There was conster-
nation, frustration, impatience in eyes and face.

    "I mean, what we were doing makes you feel bad and you think you're
going to hell, so we shouldn't do it."

    "Oh...!?"  She squinted at me. "Tell me something: did you think we
would do it again the next time you saw me?"

    "Not especially."

    "Be honest."

    "Mmm, no."

    "But you sort of hoped we would," she prompted.

    "Mmm, yeah."

    "But if you think it hurts my feelings, you wouldn't ask me?"

    "Right."

    She stared at me for a very long time.  "I should have known you'd
say that.  I should have known."  She played with her wet hair again,
and lay back on a pillow.  "Let me ask you something.  Did you really
find yourself thinking about it?  I mean, thinking about it a lot?"

    "I guess...I didn't think about it a lot, but it made me sad when
it looked like it wouldn't happen again."

    "I see..." she mused.  "But you thought about it."

    "Sure I did.  For a while."

    She smirked.  "I hope you don't grow up to be like one of those
good-looking hotshots that I don't want you to grow up to be.  Darn,
that's what's so strange about you, and me *with* you...If only we
weren't so good at it together, then neither of us would always be
expecting that it's supposed to happen that way all the time."  She
shook her head ruefully.  "Do you have any idea at all what you would
have to do to seduce me, to make me do it?"

    "You mean...like really *make* you do it with me?"

    "Yes."

    "It wouldn't be the same."

    "Why?"

    "Because you wouldn't want to do it."

    "I see," she said, pondering again.  She squinted at me.  "I wish you
were twenty.  I wish you were thirty.  I wish..."  She stopped, searching
my eyes.

    I was looking down, away from her, absently toying with a wrinkle in
the bedsheets.  She leaned forward and forced herself into my view. "Have
you made yourself cum yet?"

    I blushed and shrugged.

    "You haven't, have you?  I took your boy but I didn't give you enough
man to work with did I?  And you made it so good for me."

    This chat was annoying me.  Talking with adults was something I
never, simply never enjoyed.  They had such a baffling way of complicat-
ing matters.  As I did with other adults when they wanted a "serious"
discussion, I tried to appear unaffected.  Now, as Martha Jane talked
with me that night, the room seemed crowded and too small to hold the
thoughts I was trying to keep from her.  I felt alienated from her,
especially now that she had so obviously begun her move from a teenager
to a woman, a woman who worked for a paycheck, studied in a college, went
out with other people her own age who lived in a world that I was totally
unfamiliar with.  It was an odd and unsettling sensation for me to feel
that way about Martha Jane.

    She went on with difficulty.  "I don't know what it is we...we do to
each other..."  Absently she started to reach toward my thigh, but
stopped.  "You want *me* to ask *you* to do it?"

    Still propped on my elbow, I shrugged again.  "Sort of...I mean, the
only time I used to know you wanted to was when you said you did."

    "I...see..." she said ominously, looking at her own hands and appear-
ing troubled by my reply.  She rolled onto her tummy and crossed
her ankles in the air behind her.

    She asked, "Why did you feel so bad when you didn't find me at
Woolworth's?  Hm?  I really want to know, Speedy.  Was your mama right,
were you down in the dumps all day?"

    I gave shrug number one thousand or so.  "I don't know," I pouted.
"That was a long time ago."

    "Oh, baby, that's not an answer.  C'mon, talk to me."

    "I don't know.  I just...didn't know what else to do."

    She prompted in a singsong voice, "You could have come ba-aa-ck...on
a different day-y-y."

    I didn't say anything.  She was right, I could have gone back and
looked for her again.  I didn't know what she was getting at.

    In the same singsong she continued: "You could have...mmm... called
my mother...called my sister."

    I blushed again, but I was also a little hostile.  All I could do was
lower my head and say, "Well...."

    "Speedy, why didn't you ever call me after I left home and moved into
an apartment?"

    That remark left me slightly bristling.  "I did call.  Evelyn gave me
a number.  But they told me you had moved to another place."

    "Why didn't you look for me again?  I was very busy at first, I was
so busy I didn't sleep.  Half the time I'd eat breakfast or lunch walking
between classes.  And after a few months, I heard nothing.  I said to
myself, okay, so what, the kid's only ten years old, how does he know
what to do?  What should I expect?  And I met boys, nice boys, interest-
ing people, friends--for the first time in my life.  And after a while I
figured, well, he's growing, he has his own things, his own life.  Maybe
he doesn't want to see me, maybe he doesn't even remember who I am.  We
really didn't have to see each other, period.  We could have just
talked.  We could have just said hello.  We were still friends, weren't
we?"  She looked at me with pleading eyes.  "We were so close, we had
been through so much together.  What happened?  Why didn't I hear any-
thing from you?  Even my mother said she never saw you, not once."

    I remember the day I had gone to her front door, and no one
answered.  Apologetically, I told her about it.

    "But, Speedy, how many times did you knock on the door?  How many
times did you walk next door to see where I was?"

    I shrugged.  I didn't answer.

    "Come on, how many times?"

    "Once."

    "Once?"

    I nodded.  I held up one finger.  I avoided her eyes.  I was getting
the point.

    She repeated, angry, incredulous,  "You went to my house *once*?
That was it?  Once?"

    I nodded.  I saw her anger mounting.  I wanted to run away.  I had
never seen her angry with me.  I began to shuffle around in the bed,
looking for an excuse to get away and relieve the tension for a while.
"I think I have to go to the--"

    "No you don't, buster."  She held me down by one hand, which she
pressed tightly into the mattress.  "Now just let me calm down a minute,"
she said, and she sighed two long sighs and then she let go of my hand.
She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, and squinted.  "Oh my, I
have so much work to do with you!  You're like a wild boy that's grown up
without parents, without friends, without--"  She shook her head.

    Patiently, she lightly touched one of my hands.  "Why didn't you
fight a little for me, hon?  Why didn't you try to find me?  I want to
know, I really do.  I can get frustrated with your stubbornness and
your turning away sometimes, but I can't dislike you.  I like you too
much.  You mean too much to me.  But what on earth...what was going
through your strange head about me?  I want to know.  Can you tell me?
Do you want to tell me?"

    My head was bursting.  My heart, too.  In time I had forgotten her
and had grown used to not seeing her.  And now she was trying to make me
depend on her all over again.  I made a face at her, a silly boy's face,
a creepy grin, and then a pout.  I felt and acted exactly like the child
that I was.

    She ignored it and continued earnestly, "You would just keep looking
for me in places where I'm not, wouldn't you?  You would go into a room
by yourself, and if I wasn't there you'd wait.  And you wouldn't find me."

    "I guess," I said, embarrassed that she had me pegged.

    "You 'guess'...You wouldn't find me because I wouldn't be there."

    She rested her chin on her hands, her elbows propped under her. Her
voice became sweetly, gently prompting.  "Maybe you didn't want to find
me?  Maybe...you wanted me to find you?  Is that it?  You didn't go
looking for me because you wanted me to come looking for you.  Because
that's the way it always was, wasn't it?  I had always come to you.  You
never had to go looking for me."

    Something was welling up in me.  I wasn't sure what to do about it.
I tried to think up a cute, innocuous answer.  But I couldn't.  I was
struck dumb by a sudden awareness of how well she knew me, how little I
knew about myself.

    "Hon?" she asked.  "Isn't that what happened?  Is that what I did to
you?"

    Silently, I cried.  A big fat tear rolled out of my eye and down my
cheek.  I turned away from her.

    She moved over to me and put her arms around my back and her cheek
against my neck.

    "Tell me, hon.  Please tell me.  What was wrong?"

    "I'm sorry," I sniffed, my cheeks shiny with tears.

    "No.  I don't want you to be sorry.  I just want you to tell me."

    "But I am sorry.  I got you mad at me, I did everything wrong!"

    "No no no no no no, hon.  Now sit up.  Sit up and look at me and
let's dry off this cute face and stop this, okay?  See, if you hand'nt
refused to talk to me, me your old tried and trusted girlfriend, we
wouldn't be going through all this, would we?"

    "I guess not."  I wiped my nose with my t-shirt.

    "Don't use your t-shirt, hon.  You're so intelligent, but you can be
such a mess sometimes."  She wiped my eyes and face with a kleenex.

    "I thought you didn't want to see me anymore."

    "Sweetheart, I couldn't see you all the time, not the way I used to
when I lived next door.  You'll be in college one day, and just watch--
you won't speak to your folks for months at a time.  Even in high school
things will be different; in high school they don't have nuns who walk
you to class from eight o'clock mass every day."

    "But you never came around," I continued.

    She grabbed my face and ogled me with mock sternness. "You see what
happens when we don't have any faith, when we don't talk to each other?
It got all mixed up, didn't it?  Stop it, now.  Stop.  I want to tell you
something."

    "Okay."

    "Pay attention and stop sniffing."

    "Okay, okay." I said, wiping my face and eyes.

    She squeezed my nose with a kleenex and kissed my ear and looked at
me again.  "Hon, I don't want you to grow up all by yourself like this.
Are you listening to me?  Do you know what I'm talking about?"

    "I guess."

    "You--?"  She huffed and scratched her forehead.  "Oh, you don't, do
you?  Oh, how can I get this through to you?"

    "I'll try," I volunteered.  "Go ahead.  Try me."

    She thought for a long time.  "Do you know how much I like you,
Speedy?  Hm?  I like you so much, it doesn't even make sense.  Not to
*anybody*!  I don't even have anyone I can talk to about you. I don't
care about them, really, or what they think.  It's you I care about."
She paused,  raising her hands with a shrug.  "If we're supposed to be
'friends', then I want you to come lookin' for *me* sometime, okay?  I
don't want you to grow up always thinkin' that people are always depen-
dable or that they'll always be comin' to you.  Sometimes you have to go
out and get them.  You know what I mean?"

    "I guess."

    "If you say I guess to me one more time..."

    I gave her a silly, friendly smile.  I had stopped crying.

    "Well, I have news for you, I was really lookin' forward to seeing
you today, and last week too.  Now, last week we can't do anything about,
that's past.  But we do have today.  And I'm glad to see you, and I'm
worried about you because I show up and you walk away from me, into
yourself.  You can't keep doin' that."

    "Okay."

    She was growing a little petulant herself, nervously playing with her
fingernails.  "Now don't say okay, hon, if you don't really mean okay."

    "Okay."  I grinned.

    She resisted laughing, but finally gave in to it and held her head in
her hands in mock frustration, and beat the sheets with her fist again.
"Stop...makin'...me...laugh!"

    "So you're saying..." I pondered aloud, squinting, "you're saying I
should have looked more."

    "I am saying," she explained patiently, "that you have to have some
faith.  Not in others, in yourself.  I'm saying that you're getting older
now and you have to learn to start looking for--"  She stopped herself,
shut her eyes briefly, then lowered her voice and continued slowly,
"Sometimes, I want you to come to me.  I want you to learn to come to me."

    "Oh."

    "I want you to ask *me*.  For a change.  I want you to start it, I
want you to talk to me.  I don't want you to sulk away from me, or from
anybody, just because they don't follow you around all day trying to
figure you out.  Hon, you're too sensitive.  You're gonna lose sometimes,
you're gonna be disappointed.  But you still have to try."

    "Okay."

    "Do you really mean that?"

    "Yes."

    "Look at me.  Really?"

    "Yes, ma'am."

    She put her hand on my shoulder.  She squinted one eye. "Listen,
cowboy.  I want you to mean it.  I'm concerned about you, you know that?
Everybody who knows you likes you, but they don't always give you
everything you want.  Ask for it sometime."

    "Okay."

    She threw up her hands.  "Oh lord, another okay!"  She rose from the
bed.  "Well, you're all ready to go to sleep.  Maybe you can now, and
you'll feel better.  *I'm* going' to the bathroom."  She rose and left
the bedroom and disappeared again into the bathroom.

    I settled down into my pillow and pondered all that she had said. It
seemed sensible to me.  A little too-much-grownup, I thought. But then I
also knew, from all the sad grownups around me, from all that my scien-
tifically-inclined mind had observed among the many tragedies in that
housing project and in my family, I knew that I would not always be 12
years old.  I would be older one day.  Those who provided for me would no
longer be around; certainly, I had seen this happen often enough to
others.  I was not ready at the time, not ready to forge that far ahead.
But, I was aware, that day would come.  And I did know for certain,
again, that Martha Jane was my friend, not a bed partner or a playmate.
If she had done some growing up, then so should I.

    She shut the bathroom light and came into the hallway, but stopped
there.  She yawned and scratched her head.

    "You ready to go sleep?"

    "Yeah," I called from the bed.

    She came into the bedroom and turned out the table lamp.  In the dark
I felt her lean toward me and kiss me on my cheek.

    "G'nite, hon.  I'll be in the other room if you need anything."

    I didn't respond.  This was not exactly what I expected.

    "Okay?" she asked again.

    I nodded.

    "G'nite."  The hem of her pajama legs rasped along the floor as she
left the room.  I heard the squeaks and rattles of the sofabed being made
in the living room.  Shortly after, all the lights went out.

    I lay there for about fifteen minutes.  I looked out the window. I
kept hearing her say she wanted me to ask her first.  She wanted me to
come to her.  I turned over and propped up on one elbow and listened.
Not a sound from the other room.

    Lying back down, I tried to fall asleep.

    But a torrent of thoughts overpowered me, struggling mightily within
my head and chest.  The flood was so chaotic, I lay with my eyes tightly
shut and concentrated on sorting them out.  Among them was a new thought,
a new impulse that rose over the others with an almost deafening voice:
I wanted her.  And I wanted her to want me.  I wanted to make myself
desirable in the ways she had talked about that night.  Her words had me
asking what had happened to that rebellious, independent, indefatigable
'me' of only a few years before?  I realized I had changed.  Had Grandpa
Joe and my fussy aunts and the tough kids and the stern teachers changed
me so much?

    With each question came a plenitude of conflicting answers.  I real-
ized that I had not interacted enough with others to know how to handle
myself on my own terms.  I could not voice this realization so articu-
lately at age twelve, but I could feel it.  I knew that I had absorbed a
great deal of information, had amassed countless observations.  But I
felt powerless when it came to doing something with what I knew.

    I sat up in bed.

    I lay down.

    Rolled over.

    Sat up again.

    Was she asleep?  Or was she waiting?

    Soon I grew impatient with wondering.  I put the sheet around me
(still somewhat embarrassed about all that my underwear now contained),
and walked through the dark into the living room...



                             PART 5D:


    I walked toward the living room and stood in the doorway, allowing
the sheet wrapped around me to make as much noise as it wanted, and
hoping she would respond if she were awake.

    Dimly across the room I saw her rise and look toward me. "Speedy?"

    "Yes," I answered.  "It's me."

    "I thought you were going to sleep?"

    "Are you awake?"

    "What do you think?  Of course I'm awake.  I was worried about you."

    I told myself:  Do something, show her some fight.

    In the faint light I saw a pencil on the lamp table near the door.
I reached for it and held it like a cigarette, twiddling it gingerly in
my fingers and puffing on it.  The bedsheet wrapped around my waist and
below, I walked into the middle of the room. Martha Jane had turned
toward me on the sofabed and was lying on her side, staring at me
quizzically.

    I took a deep breath and started my act in full force.  I opened with
my Deep South truck driver's gruff and heavy drawl.

	"Hey, bay-beh!  Wonna beer?"

	She smirked.  On her side, she leaned on an elbow and propped her
head in her hand.  "Oh my, what is this strange child up to?"

	Then I made the pencil a cigar, touted and flipped it one hand. and
with my other hand on my hip I faked the higher-pitched, tightly clipped
voice and speech of the Bowery Boys' Leo Gorcey.

    "Dey call me Doubtless Dan. 'Cuz "When Dan's About, There Ain't No
Doubt!'"  I smugly pretended to straighten my tie.  "Pahdon me, ladies,
while I make myself presentable."

    Then I jammed my hands deep into my pajamas' pockets, stuck out my
tummy to simulate a beer-belly, put the pencil in one corner of my
mouth, and rocked back and forth as I did my W.C. Fields.

    "I recall when were stranded in the Andeeees.  It was TERRibble,
couldn't find a bottle o' booze anywherrre.  Had to live on nothing but
food and waterrr for tennnn daaayzz!"

	Each character brought me a step or two closer to the sofabed where
she still lay propped on an elbow and keeping a straight face.

	Then I put one hand behind my back, pursed my lips, and at the same
time raised my eyebrows and squinted my eyes--not easy to do, but it was
essential for an effective Clark Gable.

    "Now listen, Scarlett.  I know we haven't been gettin' along, sweet-
heart, so...I'll make a deal with ya.  You keep the child, and the money,
and the lumber company, and...I'll stay here at Tara with Ashley Wilkes."

	With understated sarcasm she broke in.  "Does this have an end?"

    "Why, Scarlett, whenever you say."

	"End, please."

	Myself again, I dropped to my knees and my face was level with hers.
"Yes, ma'am."

	"Speedy...What in the world are you doing?"

    "I'm trying."

    "You're trying?  Trying what?"

    "Trying.  You wanted me to try harder."

    "Well...that's not *exactly* what I had in mind, angel."

    "Well," I said, simply, "that's...right now, that's all I know."

    "Oh," she said forgivingly.  "Well then...what's next?"

	"I want to kiss you."

	"Kiss me?"

	"Yeah.  Kiss me, you fool."

	She looked at me blankly.  Perhaps she realized, as I did, that we
had never truly, romantically kissed.

	I prompted, "Alright?"

	"Well...sure.  I guess so."

	"You sure?"

	"Why wouldn't I be sure?"  She frowned.  "What are you going to do?"

	"Kiss you."

	"So kiss me."

	I took a deep breath for courage.  "Okay."

	This was something I had not only never done, but had never imagined
doing and had no idea how to go about it.  I walked the short distance to
her on my knees, stretched up over the edge of the sofabed, and brought
my face close to hers.  She appeared a little apprehensive and unsure,
but she didn't flinch.  A step at a time, I gently took the arm she was
propped upon and laid it flat on the bed, which forced her to recline on
her side.  I touched her hips and nudged her to lie flat on her back,
which she did, smiling indulgently and watching me closely.  I leaned
forward a little more and put my right hand on her cheek, then I slipped
my left arm under her neck.  Cradling her in the best romantic style of
the movies, I held her thus and brought her a little closer to me.  She
adjusted herself uncomfortably and I waited until she was settled.

    I looked into her eyes.  At first I attempted to do this with a
certain panache, or a soppy, longing Charles Boyer gaze.  But her eyes
and her face undid me.  Immediately, I fell victim to her effect on me,
and the phoney gaze disappeared.  Her half-lowered eyelids, her milk-
smooth, softly sculpted face, her slightly parted, expectant lips with
their moist, dewy glaze, and her lucid, penetrating, expectant blue-green
eyes...

    All pretense disappeared.  I wanted, more than anything else in the
world, to give Martha Jane the kiss of her life.  A real kiss.  A kiss
that would be uniquely me.  The kiss of the century.  I returned her
waiting gaze with one which I'm certain must have reflected the piquant
tenderness that swept over me.  Gently I lowered my lips toward hers,
miraculously managing on my first effort to get the interlocking tilt of
our faces just right.  I waited ever so momentarily before touching my
mouth to hers.  Then I joined our faces.  Never before had my lips felt
hers -- and never before had they felt anything like it!  Meeting no
resistance, I mouthed her gently at first, massaging my way into a com-
plete awareness of the shape and texture of her yielding petals. Amazed,
I felt her return my kiss with a slight, tentative, moist pressure
against me.  I settled my lips into hers until her almost imperceptible
return of movements matching my own told my lips that her lips had found
the most agreeable, the most telling contact.  Suprised, my lips began
melting into hers, into the wondrous, creamy silk of her that met my
seeking mouth with a seeking of her own, which I learned to read and
respond to like a mirror image of her every oral gesture. Enthralled, I
allowed my lips to caress hers with slightly more pressure and a series
of small, slow, ovular movements, which seemed as natural to me as
breathing.  She, too, returned the pressure and the movement. Enraptured,
my insides sizzled as she slid one arm along and then around my should-
ers.  A wild hunger rose in me; but I controlled and tempered it, ex-
pressing it with my hand on the side of her face as a small caress and a
tender hug, a subtle drawing of her head closer to me. Captivated, I
lifted my lips only slightly and, still touching hers, I allowed mine to
caress hers like a tantalizing, slippery, mothering feather.  Enchant-
ed, I felt her return the favor.  Intoxicated, I moved my mouth closer
again, this time with a sure but carefully restrained ardor, and simply
allowed my lips to disintegrate into hers.  Gently we writhed our mouths
against each other for another long and nourishing moment, increasing the
pressure gradually, then releasing, withdrawing with languid, reluctant
slowness, until I opened my eyes and saw hers still closed, blissful,
tranquil.  Never had I been so close to her mouth or her face, which
filled my view and shut out any and all interference from the rest of the
universe.  My lips were still wet with hers; my own felt hers, felt like
hers;  mine seemed to have disappeared, her own lips taking their place.

    Gazing raptly, I stroked her cheek.

    She opened her eyes sleepily.  At first they were questioning,
uncertain.  Then she seemed to come awake and she gently pushed me away.

	"Where," she asked skeptically, "did you learn to kiss like that?"

	"That's the way I kiss."

	"No, Speedy, nobody kisses like that.  I bet you picked that up from
the movies.  You kissed me the way somebody like William Holden kisses."

	"That," I insisted, "is the way I kiss."

	"No.  That's the way William Holden kisses."

	"He got it from me."

	"Oh...I see.   Well, that's some kiss."

	"Thank you."  Daringly, without pause, I declared, "I wanna sleep in
here."

	"There's not room enough for two."

	"Then, uh..."  My eyes rolled as I tried to overcome this latest
obstacle.  "Okay, I'll have to sleep on top of you."

	"That would be very uncomfortable, Mister Holden."

	"Well, then...I guess we'll have to sleep in the bedroom."

	She smirked.  "Well, then...I guess so."

	"Well, then..." I echoed, waiting.

	But she didn't move.  After a pause she queried me with her big,
smiling, waiting eyes.  "Well?" she said in a small voice.

	I leaned toward her and took her free hand which rested near the edge
of the sofabed.  "I want you to sleep in the other room with me, because
I haven't seen you in two years.  And because I want the first thing I
see in the morning to be you.  And because I might never get the chance
to do this again."

	Her eyes softened.  "That's better," she whispered.  She tilted her
head and looked at me warmly, tenderly.  "That's more like what I wanted
to hear you say."

    Then she rose from the bed and headed straight for the bedroom in her
floppy silk pajamas.

    Perplexed, I rose and followed her.  "Well...why didn't you
tell me that's what you wanted in the first place?"

    "Oh, how unromantic."

    "But why didn't you just tell me?"

    "Because all this time, I made it too easy for you.  Because I wanted
you to learn something.  Because I was playing hard to get."  She settled
into the bed near the lamp table, lying back with her hands behind her
head in the dark.  "That's the way girls behave in real life, hon.  They
want you to figure them out."

    I stood near the bed.  "But why do girls have to play hard to get?"

    "Because they're girls."

    "But boys don't play hard to get."

    "I know.  They're boys."

    "I see," I pondered.  "So the girls play hard to get...and the boys
do the getting."

    She winked.

    In the two years that I had been away from her, I had forgotten what
it was like to look down on her alluring body in the dark.  As I stood
watching her from the edge of the bed, it all came back.  And it came
back with a vengeance.  I did not pause, but followed my impulse and
climbed onto the bed from the foot of it, and in one smooth motion I
stretched over her and lay on her, both of us fully clothed.

    She smiled, opened her arms, and I snuggled into her neck.

    She asked, "The lesson wasn't too hard on you, was it?"

    "Did you like my Clark Gable?"

    "No."

    "Oh."

    "I liked your 'you', though.  And what a kisser."  She hugged me.

    I hugged her back.  I lifted my face and looked at her.  I felt it
was my move.  I shifted my weight to her side, letting my right arm
cradle her neck.  I looked down at her breasts.  Her nipples stood out
tautly under the cloth of the pajamas.  They were different now, less
girlish, more womanly.  Or perhaps I was two years older, had new juices
flowing from my glands, and saw her differently.  I lifted my hand to her
right nipple and with two fingers cradled and squeezed it gently over the
cloth.  She shifted slightly, leaning into me.  She watched my fingers,
then she watched me.  I allowed my hands to sweep across her chest, down
her tummy, around to her hip.  She felt different; more firm, more sleek,
more smoothly sculptured.  At the crotch of her pajamas the shape of her
tuft and mound were revealed in sharp relief.  She had lost some baby
fat; her mound was more distinct, more feminine, its contours more
erotically enticing.

    With my hand I covered the gentle swell between her legs.  Right away
I realized she wore nothing underneath.  I felt her heat.  Her tuft was
thicker now, crisper.  I made a small circle on her cunt with my palm,
which could feel where her thick outer lips gently folded in and parted.
As I continued circling, I felt her hand go to the slit in my underwear.
With three fingers she formed a cone with which she lightly enclosed the
outline of my tip.  Cupping it, she squeezed almost imperceptively, with
a slow rhythm.  I felt an incredible itch that ran the length of my cock.

    As I caressed her over her pajamas her thighs parted.  I looked at
her.  "Feels different with clothes on," I whispered.

    She nodded lazily, slipping her lower lip naughtily under her teeth.

    "Feel good?" I whispered, smiling.

    Her eyes narrowed.  She nodded slowly again.

    I rubbed her another moment until I sensed moisture in the cloth
under my hand.  Her slit had widened.  And my erection was underway.
I searched her darkening eyes.  "Do you think it would still feel good
fingerfuck you like I used to?"

    She shrugged.  "I guess," she said, grinning impudently.

    I sighed a little laugh at her joke.  I lay down flat, lifted my
hips, and pulled off my underwear, flipping it onto the floor at the foot
of the bed.  I had expected she would take a while to unbutton her pajama
top, but she sat up and grabbed the hem of the shirt and pulled it over
her head and off, like a sweater.  She lay down and arched and pulled off
her bottoms.

    She was nubile and naked.  She was beautiful.  Her pubic patch had
indeed thickened and darkened and extended below the top of her slit.
Her nipples were larger and a darker pink.  As soon as I saw her I
realized I would have to learn about her all over again.

    Settling on one elbow I carefully fondled her outer fold, which was
already slick and blossoming open to invite my finger's search for her
clit.  When I found it she swallowed and her staring eyes softened.  I
began to stroke her nub in slow tiny circles.  Immediately it began to
lubricate and stiffen, and her long thighs drifted apart...

    She whispered, "Yes..."

    With her fingers she formed a small cone around my tip again, then
she found I was hard.  Her fingers searched, finding that I had smooth
curls now instead of fuzz, and she investigated my balls and my hardening
shaft, then enclosed me, gripped, squeezed up.   Her fingers found
pre-cum at my tip.

    "Speedy," she whispered.

    I looked at her.  "Hmm?"

    "Your not a baby anymore, hon,"  she whispered, circling my corona
with a wet finger.  She shook her head and smiled, repeating to herself,
"Not a baby anymore..."



                             PART 5E:


    "Let's do this for a while," I whispered.  "Just this.  Okay?"

    "Yes."  She swallowed again.  For a while we silently enjoyed touch-
ing and stroking each other with no particular goal in mind other than
pleasing ourselves and discovering all the things about us that had
changed.

    As we touched and played we talked.  I told her about the plays I'd
done, how movies and photography had captured so much of my life.  She
told of her classes, her work, what she had learned.

    I didn't entirely take the lead; I didn't yet know how.  But I was
not as passive as in the past.  I marveled at how she had grown so lithe
and graceful.  She marveled at my new shoulders, my well-formed thighs,
my growing cock, and the hair appearing on my legs, chest, and groin.  As
the night wore on we became alternately playful and serious, lewd and
virginal.  I can't remember all of it.  Very often I try to, but it all
gets jumbled.  Our old devils had entered the dark room and overpowered
everything and everyone in it.  For a while during that night, each of us
appeared to be trying to see who could bring out the deepest sensuality
in the other, who could come up with the naughtiest turn-on, who could
make the most endearing gesture.  We shut out the narrow world and the
narrow people around us, and the world inside the room expanded. At one
point she sat up and watched and held her pussy open while I licked her.
Then again, I stood up and watched her suck me as she lay across the bed,
having to make her stop sucking early because my larger cock could now
feel more of her knowing mouth and tongue.  She would stop now and then
to play with my balls and ask if it felt good.  Then I lay on the bed and
she held onto the headboard while she hovered over my face and gave me
detailed licking instructions until she almost came.  She stopped, not
wanting to end it yet.  We lay down and hugged for a while and then began
masturbating each other again.  Our devils seethed out of us in a slow
but steadily mounting stream.  We remained gentle, held back by some
subtle self-imposed constraint that would not let us take anything too
far too quickly.  We would hold ourselves at an intense edge, as if what
we needed and what we felt could be dealt with and satisfied only by its
own intensity and its own fire, one step at a time.

    Because it had been so long since I had been touched or excited, the
nature of my arousal was new to me.  For the first time I felt a tight-
ness and a pain in my balls that was not there before.  I became more
aware of our physicality together, and understood more fully the
mysteries and the implications of what we were doing.

    I knelt on my knees over her, while she lay flat and sucked me.

    "You're dripping," she said.  She touched my tip to one nipple and
rolled a finger round the sticky fluid I left there.  "You know that?
You're dripping a lot."

    "Dripping?"

    "You're making more cum, hon.  Do your balls feel tight?"

    "Yeah, they're...very tight."

    She grinned with delight and expectation.  "Maybe you'll cum. You've
never cum, have you?"

    "I don't...I don't really know."

    "You're so much bigger and hotter than you ever were."  She gently
touched and squeezed beneath my balls.  "Does that hurt?"

    "A little.  Yeah, It's...feels kinda sore."

    "Even when I touch just a little, like that?"

    "Yes."

    "Oh, Speedy," she said, laughing to herself.  "I think we have an
opportunity here that we shouldn't pass up.  Be honest.  You never came
before?  Not even by yourself?"

    I shook my head.  "I never tried it.  Other boys told me they did,
but...I didn't see how doing it by yourself could be much fun."  I looked
down at her hand and the amount of fluid she had drawn from me.
"Maybe...I could cum."

    "Think so?"

    "What happens?  I mean, how will I know?"

    "You'll know, hon."

    "I...I dunno."

    "Do you want to fuck and see if you'll cum?"

    I nodded. "We haven't fucked in a long time...Yes."

    "Then I hope..." She stopped.  "Never mind," she said, shifting her
torso higher in the bed and then leaning back into the pillows. She was
long and the color of the dim moonlight.  She raised her knees a little
so her trim thighs could fall apart and spread wide, and then reached
down and held her cunt open for me.  "Fuck me, hon."

    I lay on her, feeling physically larger than I remembered.  This made
her seem smaller to me, more delicate.  Certainly, my erection was larger
than it had ever been.  I propped myself on my arms and my toes, looking
down as I aimed my new hardness at her dark core. My tip could feel her
wet outer lips, a feeling that had not occur- red with such clarity in
the past, and I paused there, unable to prevent a sharp intake of breath
at the surprising intensity of this sensation.

    "Yeah?" she whispered.  "Feel me?"

    I smiled and breathed hard and nodded.  "Wet me."

    She knew what I meant.  It meant that I held my erection at the mouth
of her cunt, the tip barely inside her, while she made small circles with
her hips, bathing my glans with the tight ring around her opening.  From
the first moment, I felt a twinge that told me this was different from
the way it had been before.  I was pain- fully and frighteningly aware of
the thin slippery skin of her inner lips moving on me.

    My arms trembled a little, and despite my effort to remain calm I
felt a rush of adrenalin that demanded more air in my lungs.  I heard my
breathing quicken and wobble nervously.

    "Feel me on your tip?  Feel me moving?"

    "Yes, it feels...different...very strange...very nice."

    "good...good"

    "Keep doin' it," I said, and she did.  Her movements were slight,
just enough to keep the sensation going.  I could feel myself getting
bigger and stiffer.  Very slowly I began to move forward as she main-
tained her movement.  I gradually moved deeper into her, hearing her
whispers:  "Let it go in me, let it go in... slow, slow.  I want us both
to feel all of you..."

    I bent down to watch.  "It feels so good going in..."

    "Feels good for me too, hon.  Ah."

    Very gradually I slid all the way in and could feel her muscles
rolling around my length.  "Oh," I gasped, and my head fell back
involuntarily.  My dick arched blissfully at the sensation of being
warmly gloved in the new world of her syrupy, finely textured inner
self.  Feeling this was quite a surprise, and quite alarming; I felt
something beyond me was threatening to take control.

    Trying to slow the whirl a bit, I pulled out just as slowly. She kept
up the gentle grind.  Again I moved forward, still gradually, but this
time without pause, going all the way into her.  With a soft hiss she
took in a long slow breath that she let out as a hotly whispered "Ahhhh"
just as I my entire length settled in her.

    "Speedy," she whispered, "you're bigger now.  I've never felt so much
of you inside me."

    I forced myself to pause, to adjust my outspread arms and give myself
time to absorb what was happening.  There was more of me down there now,
more flesh, more nerves, more to feel her with.  Shakily I began to
ascertain the texture and narrow shape of her inner cunt.  I was fully,
warmly, snugly encased.  It was almost entirely new, as if I'd never
ventured there before.  Despite my best mental efforts at wanting to stop
until I figured out what was going on, I began to slide in her, still
remaining deep, adjusting my angle so that I sensed the familiar nudge of
her clit against my shaft.

    "Ah, hon...you still know how."

    I looked at her, her eyes gleaming with what seemed an almost painful
pleasure.  She looked as if she might cry at any moment. She fucked with
her cunt and her eyes and her breath.

    "Is that okay?", I asked, grinning and pumping.

    She hissed, "Yes!  It's just right.  Just right."

    I began stroking her more deeply and purposefully.  An animal istic
urge welled up.  The purely physical began to assert itself, eroding my
resistance move by move.  I wondered, if I really wanted to stop, whether
or not I could.  For the moment, I couldn't.

    After a few strokes she whispered breathlessly, "Go all the way in
me, all the way...Yes, hold it there...like that, yes.  Be still a
minute.  Let me milk you inside me."  She ground her belly against me,
her inner flesh softly wringing my entire length.

    My head snapped back again, then fell forward.  I moaned, I moaned
again.  I looked down at her.

    She was smiling at me, her eyes half-closed with lust.  "Like
it?"

    "It's wonderful...your cunt feels so good..."

    "Getting closer, hon?  Does it make you want to cum?"

    "I don't...I don't want to yet.  It feels too good."

    "I like making you feel good...I missed this, I missed you...I want
to make it so good for you, the way you always did for me."

    Alarmed by a sudden and overpowering surge of pleasure, I pulled
out slightly.  "Wait," I panted.  "Wait a second."

    She slowed and stopped.  She, too, was a little out of breath.
"Are you okay?"

    "Just rest a minute."  It wasn't merely the physical sensations I was
resisting.  It was something else--new, unfamiliar, otherworldly.  I
felt I might be in better control of myself if I did the moving while she
lay back and enjoy it.

    I finally regained some of my air and composure. "Let me move in you,
now, for a while."

    "Okay."

    We both looked down and watched as I stroked steadily and deeply. I
felt that if I went too fast it would end too soon.  My existence
centered more and more tightly on Martha Jane's wet and sweetly enclosing
nether-mouth and her spread thighs and her whispers and irregular gasps.
The itch in my loins spread to my thighs; my strokes into her became less
controlled, more self-driven.  I could feel my glans warming inside her.
The something new and wonderful that I held back kept licking at me from
somewhere behind my brain.

    After many, many strokes I looked down.  I could not wrest my eyes
from what I saw.  She was looking straight into me as I looked deeply
into her.  I could tell by her taut neck and the force of her inner
spasms that she was starting to cum.

    "Don't stop...," she uttered, hardly able to move her mouth. Her eyes
and face were alive with pleasure.  She swallowed, she even seemed to try
to stop her cumming and she did not want to look away as she usually did;
cumming or not, she seemed determined to stay in touch with what was
happening to me.  Her neck was very taut.  She gradually stiffened under
me.  She smiled, wild-eyed and holding her breath.  She was no longer
undulating under me.  I kept fucking with the same rhythm while the dim-
ming light in her eyes signaled that she was sinking deeper and deeper,
and then she was entirely still for several seconds, during which her
channel tightened on me several times.  I was growing incredibly excited.
Her face and eyes were locked in a joyful stare, and I fucked her eyes
with mine.  I wanted to intensify her pleasure and her lust with words,
the same way she always intensified mine, and so in the middle of her
cumming I bent down and uttered "fuck" against her lips.  Immediately she
whimpered and then uttered that wordless cumming sound that she made in
her mouth somewhere and her cunt clutched, the tendons in her neck bulged
and pulsed.  I whispered, "I feel you cumming," and her eyes widened for
a second and seemed completely unfocused; and then with a long sigh she
gradually relaxed, and then jerked and made a little whimper deep in her
neck, then shut her eyes tight and let go of my arms which she had
gripped so tightly with her nails, and she let her head fall back and
gasped, "Oh!" and quickly caught her breath, wiping an arm across her
brow; and then holding onto my arms again and returning her eyes and her
face and her attention to me, she began again her smooth undulations
beneath me.  Her half-closed eyes glued themselves to mine as if she
wanted to miss nothing that might happen while I was in the grip of my
new and (to me) almost terrifying pleasure.

    "Keep fuckin', hon."

    "It's gettin' better," I whispered, growing breathless again.

    Her eyes widened eagerly.  "Yeah?"

    "It's getting..."  I could not describe it.

    Seeing me without words, she began a mothering croon. "It's okay,
hon...Just feel it.  Enjoy it..."

    "Oh...Martha Jane...I'm..."

    "It's okay.  Don't stop, it's okay."  As I moved on her she reached
up a gentle hand and stroked the back of my neck.  "Let it happen."

    My strokes became more deliberate, deeper, stronger.  It was a
strength I'd never felt before.  I didn't direct it, it directed me. I
didn't move faster, but I moved with more urgency.  My swelling cock
sought more of her.  It raced out ahead of my mind, which seemed to keep
falling farther and farther back, outraced by everything else.

    "Ready...?" she asked.  She could hardly talk.  And I couldn't speak
at all.  Uncertain of losing myself so completely, I clung desperately to
her eyes for safety.  An incredible fullness welled up in my balls along
with a wave of electrifying, undiluted lust.

    She whispered, waiting, "You're so hard in me..."

    She reached down between us and lightly wrapped two small fingers
around the base of my cock.  Her touch was all I could stand. Something
told me, then, that I was lost and there wasn't a damn thing I could do
about.

    Apparently she knew, as her fingers at my root must have sent the
signals of my first penile throbs.  I didn't think her lewd grin could
get wider, but somehow it did, and her eyebrows raised in wonder,
delight, victory, as she watched my face.

    "Yeah.  Yeah, you're gonna cum.  Cum in me."

    All I could say was, "Oh, I'm..."

    She raised her eyebrows again.  "Ah, it's starting--"

    "Oh!"

    Her cunt sucked at my tip.  It tickled intensely, insanely.  Her
circling hips slid her inner walls against the swollen underside of my
exulting cock, which took over completely.  My body lurched and, utterly
surprised, I felt the eerie, uncontrollable twist of unknown tubes in my
lower gut that writhed and spewed the first of my life's cum inside her.
My dick pumped into the splash.

    A low, gutsy moan oozed out of me.

    She wept happily,  "Yes, baby...Yes!"

    An onslaught of pleasure gripped me.  The universe shrank into a dot
inside of which there was only my wildly twitching cock and her begging
cunt.  All I could do was groan and spurt again, spurt twice, three
times, rapidly, wetly, violently.  Her face flooded with joy as she
watched me through slitted eyes.  I heard only her loving chant, "Cum,
honey...ahhh, so warm...cum..."

    I was no longer fucking--I rutted, blind.  More streams of me leapt
from the slit in my tip that wetly scraped her hugging walls. Soon I
began to slump under a final wave of bliss and the rest of me slurped
into her, into her eyes and her voice, her nipples and her squirming
belly, her spread thighs and her auburn tuft, as the last remnants of my
virginity disappeared forever into the hot, wet, sweet depths of Martha
Jane.

    Once finished, I quivered above her, exhausted.  I was com- pletely
out of breath, out of strength, out of cum, out of my mind. But she
wouldn't let me have air; she grabbed me by the neck and pulled me down
to her.  She held me so tightly I couldn't breathe. I didn't care.  I
couldn't hold her tightly enough.  If I had died, it was fine with me.
My young dick still throbbed, and she answered the throbs with a low
chuckle and a tightening of her inner muscles.  The fingers she had used
to make the small but catalytic ring around my base were now pulling on
my dick as I softened.  With half my length still inside her she
whispered hotly, "Get it all in me!", and firmly wrung me dry.  "All of
it..."

    I could only murmur into her breasts. "Oh...so good!  Whew!"

    "I know, honey.  I know."

    I could only think to myself:  I am out of control.  I'm completely
out of control.  I am going to hell.  It's so good and we both like it so
much that it has to be a sin.  I'm Adam in the Garden of Eden and I've
taken deeply, enjoyably of the apple.  Everything is different now,
forever.

    I raised up to look at her face.  She smiled at me, and then pouted,
and then blushed, and then one of her eyes squeezed out a large tear.
"Oh, baby, you came inside me.  Oh...oh, I didn't think I'd..."  She
wiped the tear away, quickly, and sniffed.  I kissed her wet cheek, and
she pulled me to her with a strong hug.

    She sniffed again, holding me to her.  "I'm so happy for you.  You
feel so warm in me."

    I whispered against her flesh, "It was soo good."

    She tightened her hug, still panting.  "I know, hon.  Oh, I know."
She gave a little laugh.  "Will you still respect me in the morning?"

    I nodded against her.

    She hugged me, held me.  Soon we were calm.  She stroked my hair.
She asked, "How do you feel, hon?"

    "I am..." I gulped.  "Am I going to go to hell?"

    "We are both going to hell, hon."  Slowly she shook her head back
and forth against mine, murmuring sleepily, "But I can't help it."



                             PART 6A:


    Neither my parents nor Martha Jane's mother were home that
week.  She slept with me for the first time.  When I woke, earlier
than usual, the morning sun was just above the rooftops of the
buildings beyond mine.  Dazzling shafts of sunlight rushed into the
room.  Water was running in the bathroom.

    I knocked on the bathroom door and Martha Jane invited me in to
take a bath with her.

    I told her I'd love to.  I walked into the bathroom and stood in
front of the sink, looking at myself in the mirror.

    She noticed me and said, "Do you spend every morning looking at
yourself in the bathroom mirror?"

    "I don't look any different," I said, observing the same old me
in the mirror.

    "Oh," she smirked, soaping her legs.  "But how do you FEEL?"

    I took in a deep breath, my shoulders back and my chest out,
extended my arms far out at each side, and intoned as loudly as I
could in my best, loudest, deepest, Texaco Opera Theater baritone,
"Steeee-vennnnnn!".  I beat my chest several times and grunted like
a gorilla.  Then going back to my operatic bellow, I sang from the
famous aria from Barber of Seville:  "Lala Lalala Lalala Lalala
Lala...Figaro! Figaro! FigaroFigaro Feeee-gaa-ro!"

    She said, "My, my!  Were you, uh, referring to last night?"

    I grinned.

    "Veerry flattering."  She stood and moved to one end of the
tub to make room.  "C'mon, let's wash the sleep off you."

    I climbed in and she handed me the soap, but before I got
started she held me close to her bubbly-slick nakedness and
hugged me.

    "You were asleep when I woke up," she said.  "You're a wonder-
ful lover."   She kissed my forehead.  After I soaped down she
took the bar of soap from me and lathered her hands, then reached
down to wash my cock.

    She winked.  "Remember this?"

    "Mm-hm."

    "I never thought of using soap on you when we started all this.
Of course, you're a lot bigger now."

    She rinsed me and stepped out of the tub to dry off.  She had
chores to do that day, she said, but we had time for breakfast
and a little talk.  I saw a small blue bag in the corner of the
room and asked, "That's all you bought over here with you?"  She
told me the blue bag was filled with enough spermacide and powders
to lower the Indian birth rate.  She blushed and said, "You put an
awful lot of cum in me."  After I fell asleep the night before,
she had douched twice, and twice again before I came into the
bath.

    "Douched?" I asked.

    "It's a long story, hon.  Later."   She blushed again.

    Then I remembered reading about it.  "Oh.  You mean, 'cause
we didn't use a rubber?"

    She sighed impatiently.  "Yes."

    "I don't mind using one."

    "No!" she said firmly, spreading jars of makeup on the edge of
the sink.  "And you just forget that those ugly things exist."

    I asked, "Doesn't all that stuff make you sore or dry inside?"

    "We can always apply some...lotion," she said, blushing again.
I was amused at her modesty.  After a night of raw passion, she
blushed and avoided my eyes continually.  She got into her bra,
panties, and slip right away--a far cry from the way we started
out a few years before.  As I dried off I watched, fascinated and
charmed at the sight of her putting on makeup.

    "What are you staring at?"

    I answered, "Watching you doing woman things."

    She laughed mildly, dabbing at her face with powder.  "I'm
glad you find it so enjoyable.  We women think it's just a pain
in the neck."

    "I like watching."

    "How can you get such a thrill out of watching a female cover
up what she really looks like so she can throw the wool over
everyone's eyes?"

    "I like watching women do woman things."

    "I see."

    I paused.  "I like watching you do woman things.  It's not
just watching.  It's watching you."

    "Speedy.  You're a dear.  Really."

    "I'll fix breakfast," I said, hanging up my towel.

    "You've added cooking to your many talents?"

    "Sure," I said.  "I've been hanging out in a restaurant for
years."

    "Well...I'll try anything once.  Hope we live."

    I was pretty noisy about it, but I managed to get the eggs
sunny-side up and the toast looking just right in two plates on the
small kitchen table.  Out in the back yard I found a wild daisy and
placed it in a small glass of water on the table.  She entered the
kitchen in her slip.  "Wow," she said, "Look at this, picture
perfect!  You're being so nice to me.  It looks beautiful.  Is it
edible?"

    We ate and talked.

    She told me about her schedule for the week.  Just listening to
what she had planned was exhausting.  "I'm a work fiend," she
confessed.  "I feel guilty if I don't work myself to death every
day."  She told me about her classes, the kinds of projects she was
doing, the problems she encountered with teaching in special
education.  I told her, "But you like it," and she nodded.  "Yes,"
she said, chewing off a corner from a piece of toast, "not because
I'm so dedicated, but because I'm so neurotic.  I'm terrified of
ever being poor like this again."  I asked her more about what she
did, about the people she met at school, about what college was like.

    "The first thing you should know," she warned with a strong edge
of sarcasm, "is that every professor at Memphis State is a Commu-
nist.  And anyone who shows up expecting to actually learn anything
is a pathetic egghead.  All the girls are virgins, regardless of how
many football players they've slept with."  She went on with this
litany of definitions, exaggerating each item and apparently having
a good time doing so; but after a while I realized that she was
actually defining herself as a hardworking, dedicated outsider.

    She stopped at one point and looked at me hesitantly. "Speedy,
would you...would you like to spend an afternoon with me and go to
Memphis State?  It's the holidays, but they're open--at least the
library is.  That probably doesn't sound very exciting, but--"

    I breathed in amazement.  "Really?"

    "Do you want to?"

    "That would be the best adventure I've had since Uncle Johnny
let me spend two hours in the Bump 'em Cars at the fairgrounds."

    "Yes, well, it does get a little like the Bump 'Em at exam
time, but...don't get all worked up, now, it's not the biggest
thrill I could think of for somebody as adventurous as you are."

    "But," I said earnestly, "it's what you do."

    She stared at me, taken aback.

    I went on enthusiastically, "It's your...it's your world, like
mine is in the movies and the plays.  And yours is college and
learning to be a teacher.  Of course I want to see it."

    She blinked and cleared her throat, propping her elbows on the
table and folding her hands.  "Speedy, do you know how many boys
your age and older--much older--just want to spend an afternoon
with me so they can get inside my pants?"

    "Get inside your pants?  Hm, that's a funny expression, I
never heard that one before.  You mean...to fuck?"

    "I mean that's all they want to do."

    "Don't they ever do anything else?"

    "A lot of them, Speedy, no.  Do you know what a tragedy it is
in my life just to have an argument with some boy because I have
work to do and I don't have time, just no time right away, right
then, right now, to go out with them?  They think I'll hop into bed
with them to express my undying my gratitude for their taking me to
a football game and watching them scream and guzzle beer and make
fools of themselves."

    "So," I said, tenuously, "...so do you do it?"

    "Of course not.  And then I don't hear from them for two weeks,
or a month.  Until they get horny again, and all of a sudden they
develop this deep interest in what I'm doing with my life and my
time."

    I grimaced.  "What shitheads."

    "That's a very...apt description, hon."

    "Apt?" I echoed.

    "Yes, it means--"

    "Don't tell me.  I wanna look it up."

    "I'll tell you what," she said, reaching across the table and
taking my hand, "You go with me, say, Thursday afternoon, and I'll
show you lots of things you can look up.  Would you like that?"

    "Sure."

    We cleaned up a little, as I had left some record albums lying
about, and Martha Jane made phone calls while she polished her
shoes.  Still in her slip, she went into the bedroom and started
making the bed.  When I went in there to help her we were almost
finished when she asked me to sit on the bed and started undoing my
jeans.  I told her I thought she had to get dressed for her inter-
views, but she said we still had a little time and she could stay in
her slip for now.  "I've always been curious about something," she
said, taking out my cock.  "We still have some time before I go.  I
want to show you something about your body."  Of course, I didn't
object.  With my legs hanging over the bed and Martha Jane kneeling
before me, she licked and sucked me until I was hard and then she
started fisting me quickly, her hands gliding smoothly up and down
my shaft.  Again I was startled to feel all the things that happened
in my groin as I approached orgasm.  She could tell I was close
when I began throbbing erratically.  As I neared cumming she took
one of my hands and put it into my crotch under my balls.  "Feel
here, underneath," she said.  "Keep your hand there.  In a minute
you'll feel your muscles jump."  Sure enough, I could feel swelling
and movement down there.  Then she pulled down the straps of her
slip and shoved the front of her bra below her breasts, and brought
her bosom closer to my cock.  As she fisted me she whispered, "I've
always wondered what this feels like...c'mon, hon...c'mon..."

    Soon I felt those secret muscles moving under my fingers, and I
gasped frantically, "I'll get it on you!" but she grinned and said
"It's okay, I can change...c'mon..."

    As my eyelids drooped I lost focus, and though my resources were
limited because of the night before, I started cumming.  Encouraging
me, she whispered, "C'mon...c'mon," and then "Oh!" as I gave her a
tight little squirt on her left breast.  She slowed and tightened
her pumping and I squirted again in the same place and she was
delighted.  The rest streamed out thinly over her hand and made
squishing noises while she finished me off.

    I lay back on the bed, breathless.  She stood and leaned over
me, giggling.  A drop of me ran down the swell of her breast and
sneaked under the nipple.  "Was that good?" she asked.  "You getting
used to cumming now?".  I told her it was good, but it was still a
little scary.  She said, "Speedy, I can't imagine you being afraid
of anything like that."

    "No," I said, "not that kind of scary.  It's just...it's
different.  It takes over, and it all happens at once."

    "That's the way it's supposed to feel, hon."  She walked to the
bedside table, got a kleenex, and wiped off her breast.  "But don't
worry.  You'll get accustomed to letting yourself go.  I love
watching you cum.  I never thought I'd enjoy it so much, but you get
so hard and it's so intense for you.  I like that about you."  She
wadded up the kleenex and bent down to kiss me on the nose.  "That's
one of a lot of things I like about you."

    She did not see me again until Thursday, three days later. Where
she was for three days I didn't know.  She called at least once a
day, and on Wednesday morning she came clomping with her high heels
and purse and Sunday best to see that I had not transformed the
apartment into a Frankensteinean horror.  Each night just as I
climbed into bed she would phone from next door and ask how I was.

    The phone rang Tuesday night around 9:30.  I picked up.

    "Hello," I began.  "This is the Louvre.  Wanna buy some French
post cards?"

    "Speedy, what if this had been someone else on the line?"

    "I would say 'wrong number' and hang up."

    "Did your mom and dad call today?"

    "Yes."

    "So how are they doing?"

    "Sounded like she was having a good time."

    "Just 'she'?  What about your new daddy, didn't he have any-
thing to say for himself?"

    "He never talks to me."

    "Now, that's mean.  Maybe you just never talk to him."

    "I don't think he knows how to use a telephone yet."

    "Speedy, you must learn to like him.  He's your daddy now."

    "It feels funny talking to you on the phone and you're right
next door.  Are you gonna sleep over here?"

    "...I can't, hon."

    "Why, what's wrong?"

    "I just...can't.  I know it's silly, but I can't.  I'll have to
tell you all about it."

    "Okay."

    "You all tucked in bed?"

    "Yep."

    "Well, you go to sleep.  And don't be afraid to call me if
anything goes wrong, okay?"

    "All right."

    "G'night, cowboy."

    "G'night, Miss Scarlett."

    In later years, spending most of a vacation alone would not have
been my first choice.  But that week my mind seemed particularly alive
and sensitive.  Waking, walking about town, entering a movie and
walking back out, and then strolling home, I followed the path of the
rising, passing, and setting sun as I had never done before.  In the
late afternoon I made a sandwich, packing it and a wedge of cheese
into my G.I. Joe mess kit, and defied the world by hiking all the way
to the edge of Exchange Street, at the very zenith of the hill at the
avenue's end, and sat on a bluff overlooking the river.  Battle-
hardened youth that I was after this gruelling six-block walk uphill,
I ate from the kit and swigged heartily from my canteen filled with
Nehi Grape Soda, and watched the sun go down on the flat, distant
shore of Arkansas.  The sky changed colors minute by minute, so
gradually that it was always a surprise when I surveyed the horizon
again to see how the silent panorama had repainted itself.  Before
dark it turned magenta, then intense purple, and finally black.  As
the sky dimmed, distant lights not seen in the sunlight became visible
one by one.  I wondered what might be out there.  I wondered what it
might be like not having to return home but to keep on going,
straight, past those lights and onto new lights, new rivers, new
bridges and towns.

    What got me back home was not a strong desire to be there but to
be in bed when Martha Jane called.  The phone rang at exactly 9:30
and I picked up.

    "Why, Martha Jane, you sound so clear on this wonderful invention,
Mr. Bell's telephone, just as if you were right next door!"

    "Silly.  Were you a good boy today?"

    "No."

    "That's the spirit.  Did your mother call?"

    "Yes, they're fine.  She called around supper time."

    "They'll be back Friday, then.  And next week you'll move out
of the Lauderdale Courts forever.  Won't that be great?"

    "I guess."

    "You don't sound so happy about it."

    "Well..."

    "Oh, you will be when you get there.  And you'll have that
wonderful room all to yourself instead of keeping your things in
cardboard boxes in that closet."

    "Well...maybe."

    "Oh, c'mon, you'll love it."

    "I'll have different neighbors, though."

    "...I'll have to talk to you about that...We'll have a nice talk
all about that tomorrow.  You still want to go with me to Memphis
State?"

     "I'm ready now."

     "I'm over here with textbooks up to my nose, so I'll be up a
while.  But I'll still be up bright and early, so you better get
your beauty sleep.  You all tucked in bed?"

    "I sure am, Miss Scarlett."

    "You didn't leave a stinky sink full of dirty dishes, did
you?"

    "No'm, Miss Scarlett."

    "...Are you mad at me for not being over there?"

    "No'm, Miss Scarlett."

    "Well...Okay.  I'll be there at ten in the morning."

    "Yes'm, Miss Scarlett."

    "You be all ready to go."

    "Yes,'m, Miss Scarlett."

    "Stop it.  G'night."

    Late in the night I was standing in the middle of the universe
and I had the sensation of getting larger and smaller at the same
time, while the universe shrank and expanded at the same time, and
the part of me that shrank was not getting small fast enough for the
universe that was shrinking, and the part of me that was expanding
was not expanding fast enough, and the part of the universe that was
shrinking kept pulling my expanding self back into the part that was
shrinking, and yet nothing was changing at all in any direction.  As
I tried to comprehend this a low-pitched hum grew louder, louder,
and soon it was a deafening buzz that threatened to crush even my
thought.

    I woke up, literally poised to jump through the ceiling.  I was
gasping and sweating.  I was not in bed, but standing in the pitch
black hallway between the bedroom and living room.  Apparently I had
leapt from the bed in a single broad jump, as I vaguely remember
being in the air just before I jerked to a halt.

    In the kitchen I made a glass of ice water and brought it to the
living room, where I sat in front of the Philco and turned it on.
The pearlescent eye of the green tuning tube glowed and stared at
me.  I picked up static.  Trying to relax, I listened.  After a
minute I heard a voice in there.  I could not hear the words.
Concentrating on it took my mind off the nightmare and the eerie
panic that crept into me when I remembered it.

    This was a dream I'd had before, perhaps a year earlier.  I
never told anyone about it;  I didn't know how to describe it.  Back
in bed, I removed my underwear and moved to the bed to be naked
under the moonlight.  Lying on by back, I spread my legs and looked
at my growing, lean, surprisingly strong-looking young body.  I
tried to remember what cumming felt like.  It was unimaginable
while it was happening, and so it was when I tried to recall it.  A
small machine whirred inside my chest, urging me to do something;
like the voice in the static, my brain could not understand what the
machine was saying.  I gazed past the moonlight and out into the
city.  Out there, awake, all the things I wanted to do were waiting.

     A cricket chirped.  I heard the sugary spring Southern night
air glide past the window and felt me and the yard and the tree and
Martha Jane next door and our little patch of earth turning slowly
together in the universe.  As fell asleep again I imagined I could
feel the morning approaching us.



                             PART 6B:


    Thursday was overcast and chilly.  Martha Jane and I made a long
trip over two local bus lines to the campus of Memphis State, which
was farther out than I had ever gone in my explorations.  When we
arrived I was both excited and apprehensive.  There was so much to
it!  Surrounded by a well-to-do suburb and even a few estates, the
campus of several Georgian buildings and dormitories spread over a
rustic landscape that alternated between broad green pasture and
heavily forested alcoves of pine, maple, oak and magnolia.

    I'm certain I must have seemed like a spellbound infant.
Tongue-tied, I stayed at her side like a puppy as Martha Jane, one
arm carrying a shopping bag loaded with books and notebooks, led me
down the long rambling drive toward the main library.  I spent so
much time looking up and stretching my neck to take in everything
that I tripped over every curb and twig along the way.  Martha Jane
finally had to lead me by the hand.  At the library's columned
entrance I ran to the door and tried to yank it open for her.  Sur-
prised by its weight, I was jerked back against the door and had
to lean far backward to open it again.

    She laughed, "Don't be in such a hurry."

    Inside, I was overcome by the solemnity and silence in the large
and spacious building, which was far more imposing than the small
branch library I knew in my neighborhood.  Martha Jane walked ahead
of me to the front reception desk.  I followed, my neck craning and
my eyes agape at the high walls solid with shelves and books.  My
tennis shoes squeaked softly on the tile floor and echoed into the
ceiling.  I was so flabbergasted that I walked right into her as she
stopped to have the receptionist check her bag.  I shifted to avoid
standing on her feet, apologizing so loudly that my voice shot back
at me several times over, startling me, and I had to lower my
volume.  Turning around and trying to take it all in, I took a step
or two in each direction to try to see down the paths of shelves and
oak tables to my left and right, only to stumble backward with a
loud clunk into the face of the reception desk.

    Martha Jane said quickly to the receptionist, "He's going to be
with me.  He's not a student or anything, he doesn't have an i.d.--"

    The bespeckled, matronly woman smiled at Martha Jane and handed
her back the shopping bag of notebooks.  The lady looked exactly the
way I had always imagined librarians would look.

    "That's perfectly all right," the woman said warmly, and she
peered down at me cheerfully through her bifocals.  "Well, young
man, this must be your first visit."

    Martha Jane laughed and blushed.  "Yes, it is.  I'm afraid he
doesn't have his bearings yet.  Bumping into everything..."

    "Oh, don't you worry, he'll find his way around.  You enjoy
yourself, young man.  If you're interested, there is a child's
section right over there in that far corner just past the card
catalog cabinet."

    I asked, "Where do you have the newspaper stacks?  I guess I'll
start with The New York Times Index?  Do you have it back to the
1920's?"

    She looked at me and then at Martha Jane, a little surprised.

    Martha Jane grinned at her.  "He likes newspapers."

    "Oh, how interesting.  He's your son, is he?  Oh, I'm sorry, you
certainly don't look that old.  Your brother?"

    "No, he's my..."

    "Student," I interjected, somewhat formally.  Behind me, out of
the lady's sight, I felt Martha Jane poke a finger in my back.

    "Oh, I see.  How nice, bringing your students to the library in
person, that's a wonderful idea.  Well, now, you get settled and
then come back here and I'll show you to the periodical stacks."

    "Thank you," I said, and Martha Jane also whispered a thank you
and led me by the hand into a small alcove with a large writing desk
upon which she parked her shopping bag.  She smiled wryly at me as
she removed her sweater.  "You're my what?  My student?"

    "It had a certain status."

    She blushed. "I'm glad you spoke up.  I had to stop myself
because I almost said you were my boyfriend.  I'm certain she would
have got a rise out of that."

    I smiled broadly.

    "Now, you've been in libraries before, so you know what the
general setup is.  I'll be working right here if you need anything,
or anybody at the big front desk can help you."

    She left me on my own.  A young woman at the front desk gave me
a brochure with a map of the building and directed me to the card
catalog filing cabinet.  On first seeing it I was taken aback.  So
many drawers!  And in each drawer were hundreds of index cards, some
packed so tightly they had to be shoved back firmly to be read.  I
didn't know where to begin.  There were so many choices.  The
problem was, I wanted to see everything at once.  Going through them
became stultifying after a while; I wanted something more substan-
tial, something I could hold in my hands.

   Leaving the card catalog as a hopeless case of too much to absorb
at once, I moved to the stacks themselves.  Looking over the titles,
I couldn't imagine how any book or index or subject might be missing
from this building.  Following the map, I took the elevator to the
next floor and found myself confronted with hundreds of shelves,
thousands of books.  The musk of paper filled the room.  And on the
next floor I encountered the same odor, and the same endless maze of
stacks and shelves and labels and volumes.  On the elevator again,
to yet another floor of the same thing.  And from there, a curled
iron stairway leading to still more, and then to another wing of
more floors, more tiers of books.  I grappled with one thick book
that almost pulled me to the floor as it slid from its shelf.  It
was a weighty volume of nineteenth century photographs.  Opening its
large pages separated by translucent tissues which themselves had
chipped and yellowed, I found myself in the grip of an eerie
fascination with the faces of the people in the pictures.  Starkly
and stiffly posed, their eyes seemed alive and knowing--a strange
and hair-raising sensation, because these people had posed for the
photographs in the 1870's.  There were long shots of tailcoated,
booted men in front of banks and post offices and on street corners.
And there were pictures of the streets.  New York City in 1876.  An
interior of a fancy restaurant, the shot taken so that the tall
windows lined up along the right and rays of sunlight drenched the
floor and the tables, leaving the corners of the room deep in
shadow.  I could smell the wood frames of the windows, hear the
photographer prompting carefully as he held the shutter open for the
long exposures required in those days.  The streets and the build-
ings and the rooms struck me as being oddly familiar; I was not
surprised at seeing them, and felt that I was seeing nothing new.
Everything seemed to be exactly in its proper place.  The surprise
was my knowing that it was so, that I had seen these buildings and
their arched windows and tall shadowed doorways before.

    A rustle of clothing startled me.  I looked up.  Martha Jane was
strolling toward me.  I had been studying the book so closely that
my eyes watered and the back of my neck was cramped.

    "You've been gone for hours," she said.  "I looked everywhere
for you.  Do you have any idea what time it is?"

    "I'm sorry," I stuttered, finding my mouth dry.

    "Find anything interesting?"

    "This," I said, holding the book open with both hands.  I
touched my fingers to a full-page photograph of 4th Avenue, in
downtown Manhattan, taken in 1881.

    She looked at it.  "What about it?"

    "I've..."  I was startled as the words came out of my mouth,
almost on their own accord.  "I've been here."

    "Here?  You've been on this street before?"

    I nodded.

    "Speedy, this is...Hon, this street is in New York City.  The
picture was made sixty or seventy years ago.  Maybe it reminds you
of Adams Street in Memphis.  It looks a lot like it."

    I shook my head slowly, not believing it myself.  "No," I
muttered.  "I mean it feels like...I was here, on this street.
This street."

    "You mean, like deja vu.  You know about deja vu?"

    "Yes.  I remember looking it up.  This is what deja vu is?"

    Standing beside me, she gazed into the picture.  I saw her
eyelashes flutter as she scanned the page from corner to corner.
I felt embarrassed.  It was true: the photograph was from another
century, from a place I'd never seen.

    She looked into my eyes with her piercing blue-green orbs
floating in white.  "You feel you were there?  Really?"

    I nodded.

    "I've had feelings like that too, hon."

    Her words both astounded and intrigued me.  For a moment both of
us stared at the photograph.

    Then she said, "Come with me.  I want to show you something."

    She led me down the iron staircase and then down another, to a
floor of magazine stacks and dozens of metal shelves piled with
loose papers and brochures.  She took me to a corner where her hand
went straight to an enamel-backed issue of a National Geographic.

    "Look at this," she said mysteriously, and flipping the pages
along her thumb she seemed to know exactly the page she wanted and
found it right away.  She held the magazine open and motioned for me
to take it.  "Look," she said quietly.

    It was a grayed, gold-bordered monochrome photograph.  The woman
was in a shawl and held a child wrapped so heavily that only part of
its forehead could be seen.  In the background was what appeared to
be a desert.  The picture was taken from the knees up.  The woman
wore what looked like a light gray (pale blue?  pale yellow?) heavy
shift tightly girdled at the waist with a white cord.  The folds and
shadows of the loose garment revealed that she was slim and deli-
cate.  Looking suspiciously toward the camera, her bright eyes
projected a strange mixture of fear and concern.  Her left arm
cradled the child closely; but her right was extended across the front
of the child's wrapped body, facing the camera, and the sleeve of
her garment fell back to reveal her long, slender white arm with her
fingers spread around the child's covered head.

    She breathed, "It's me."

    And as I continued studying the woman, who did not look like
Martha Jane except for her remarkable eyes, Martha Jane stretched
her right hand across the page and spread her fingers in the same
pose that was in the picture.  I was silent, numbed.  Their arms
and hands looked alike.

    She mused aloud, "There's probably nothing to any of it.  It's
just a feeling I have when I see this picture.  I've looked at it
hundreds of times.  But always, I get the same feeling.  I've seen
that desert.  And those mountains back there on the landscape."  She
sighed, taking the magazine from me.  "Or maybe I'm just going crazy
or..."  She jammed the magazine back in its place and added soberly,
"...maybe I just take myself too seriously."

    I felt giddy at the prospect that I wasn't the only creature in
the world who had otherworldly sensations.  Martha Jane reinforced
that when she said, "Speedy, I hope you don't think I'm just weird,
but I feel those things all the time."

    I said earnestly.  "I feel the same way sometimes."

    As she led me out of the room she confided, "Speedy, you're the
only person in the world I could have shared that with."

    "What do you think it means that we both feel those strange
things?"

    She put a finger to her lips and whispered mischievously, "Shh.
It means we're both crazy."

    I whispered back, "I won't let the lady at the front desk know."

    "Come on, let's go to the cafeteria before they close and get
a late lunch.  I'll introduce you to the wonderful world of institu-
tional food."

    The cafeteria was closing when we arrived, so we picked out
cold sandwiches and cokes in plastic cups and went outside to sit
on the massive steps of the administration building.  From there
most of the campus spread before us, as far as we could see, into a
dense wood beyond a grove of magnolias.  A chill, early spring wind
picked up and rustled the stiff leaves of the magnolias.  Some
sparrows and mockingbirds hopped around us and we pitched them the
crumbs that were left from our lunch.  Martha Jane was finishing the
last of her coffee, which she referred to as "college soup."

    "Horrible stuff," she said, sipping.  "It's addictive.  Ruins
your tummy.  Gives you insomnia."

    "Why do you drink it?" I asked.

    "Because it's oh so necessary, hon.  When you get into college
you'll find out how very very needed it is.  I was falling asleep
taking those notes in the library.  Sometimes you think you'll go
into a coma, but you just keep on working."

    She finished the coffee and sat one step lower than me, her
knees raised and her head propped on them.  She looked up at me
sideways.

    "You're finally leaving the project.  I'd give anything to be
leaving, though I know I will someday, not long from now.  My
mother's dating now.  She met a very nice man in the office supply
business.  He has a beautiful home right out there, near where you'll
be living with your mom and your dad.  He's in a richer neighborhood,
so I know it's not quite the same, but...it'll be yours, and you'll
have your own place.  You're way too old to be living in a closet,
you have too many interests.  I should think you'd be very happy
about all that.  But you're not."

    I shook my head.  I pinched a small piece off the remains of my
sandwich and pitched it to a lone mockingbird a few steps below.

    "Why not?" she asked gently.

    I didn't respond, holding back the real answer.  Finally I just
shrugged.

    "Is it because I won't be your neighbor anymore?"

    I nodded.

    "Speedy, that's very nice.  But you can't give up everything
just to live next door to me.  I'm hardly there anymore, anyway.
And when I can, I'll be moving away again.  Then what would you do?"

    "Well...I'll stay in the project until you move again."

    "And then what?"

    I shrugged.

    "And then what?" she repeated.

    "I don't know."

    "Speedy, listen to me--"

    I tried to remain casual.  Stubbornly I said, "You're my friend."

    "I know, hon, but both of us have to get out of that place sooner
or later.  Both of us need homes, not just a hole in a wall."

    "You're my friend," I said again, offering another crumb to the
white-trimmed mockingbird, who chased greedily after it.

    "I know, but you'll have other friends.  A whole neighborhood
full of them, not like those rough kids downtown."

    "You're my friend," I said again, stubbornly, and pitched another
crumb.

    "And you'll be in high school before long, at Christian Brothers,
and there's so many smart kids there just like you--"

    "Don't make me cry!" I demanded, crying and then choking it back
in the same instant--but not soon enough to stifle the single tear
that dripped down my face.  My nose ran and I sniffed loudly.

    "Honey!" she whispered in amazement.  "Here..."  She produced a
kleenex from her sweater pocket and reached up toward my face.

    But I took it from her.  "No!" I said stubbornly, and wiped my
nose.  "No, I won't cry.  I will...not...cry.  I'm too old to cry.
I don't have any business crying."

    She started to rise but I put my hand on her shoulder, so she
moved up only one step and was sitting next to me.

    "Baby," she crooned, "you've been holding this back from me for
a long time, haven't you?"

    "There's nothing to hold back.  You're my friend.  That's all.
I've lost friends before.  And I've liked people who didn't like me.
And you told me things you didn't like about people and how much
work you're doing and how you can't spend all your time with them.
I know you have to leave the place.  I know you want a home.  This
week I went down to the river front and watched the sun, and I saw
the whole world in front of me and I wondered how big it was, how
much of it is out there and how much I had to do.  How much I had to
learn.  It's your world, too.  I know you'll leave, or I'll leave.
And I'd never try to stop you.  I'd never try to take that away from
you and I'd never blame you, like I did last time.  'Cause I know
it's not because of me, it's because of what you have to do, it's
what you want.  And because--"

    I blew my nose hard, once and for all.  "Because I know you
don't like schmucks, and I don't wanna be a schmuck!"

    "Speedy..."

    I would not look at her.  I could feel her looking across at me,
leaning toward me.  "I don't have to actually *like* leaving my
friend on the other side of town, do I?" I complained.  "I don't
have to be a schmuck, but I don't have to like it either."

    For a long minute she didn't say anything, and I refused to let
her see my face until I felt I was totally in control again.

    I felt her arm go around my shoulder.  She put her cheek to mine
for a second then pulled away from me.  "Look at me," she said.
When I hesitated she said, "Look at me, hon."

    I turned to her and she had her teeth and jaw set in a playful,
mock-tough, happy little smile.  She said, "C'mere" and put both
arms loosely around my neck and pulled me to her slightly so that
our foreheads were touched.

    "Hey, bud, answer one question."

    "Yeah?"

    "Did you mean everything you just said?"

    "Yes."

    "You didn't just get it from some movie somewhere?"

    "Hey, lady...This ain't Hollywood."

    "Speedy...Steven...don't ever let me call you a little boy
again.  Don't even let me think it.  If you catch me doing it,
remind me of today.  Promise?"

    "Promise."

    "I've got a proposition for you, Mister Ricci."

    "Proposition?"

    "Yeeeahh...We still going to the movies tonight?"

    "If you want."

    "Yeah, I want, but after that...I want you to spend the night
with me."

    She stuck her tongue out, far out, and licked my nose.

    I wiped it off with the kleenex.  "What if my folks come home
early or something?  Tomorrow's Friday."

    "Then we'll stay up and keep watch."

    "You don't have to.  Stay with me, I mean."

    "Yes I do, hon.  Yes I do."




                             PART 6C:


    That night we walked through light drizzle all the way to the
Warner's on Main Street and saw "The High and the Mighty."  The
minute the film was over, I knew I'd go back to see it again and
again.

    "Oh, my," Martha Jane said as we rose from our seats to leave.
"That was pretty schmaltzy, wasn't it?"

    "Yeah, it was.  Schmaltzy.  That's what makes a great movie."

    "You just say that because John Wayne was in it and he saved the
airplane."

    "But that's what schmaltz is," I insisted.

    We had been sitting near the screen.  As we turned to go out,
we were confronted with a thick crowd moving at a snail's pace.

    "It'll take forever to get out of here, Speedy."

    "Don't worry.  Follow me."  I led her on a detour down one of
the side aisles where I pushed down the handle on a black-painted
door that was difficult to see.  It opened into an empty alley that
led to the main street.

    She said, "Hey, I'm glad I decided to bring you with me."

    Outside, the drizzle had grown into light rain.  I walked
out into it.  "It's like Gene Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain", I
said, holding out my arms.

    "You won't start tap dancing, will you?  Speedy, get under
the umbrella with me.  You'll get soaked."

    I walked ahead of her.  "But I want to.  It's drama, it's
Hollywood.  It's schmaltz."

    "It's insanity."

    I stayed ahead of her, getting wetter by the minute.  Now and
then I'd look back at her, a few yards behind me under her um-
brella.  "Come on, Scarlett!  Where's your sense of adventure?"

    "It's right here under my umbrella."

    A man in a rain coat and rainhat passed me on the sidewalk going
the other way.  He looked at me, and I gave him a silly smile.  Then
he looked at Martha Jane behind me, who strained to give him a
perfectly normal smile.

    She called out to me, "People are staring at youuuu."

    "Martha Jane, honey," I said cockily.  "This is my night.  I just
got that feelin', baby.  It's like...like money from home.  Like,
nothin' can stop me now."

    "Pneumonia will stop you.  Hon, you've seen too many movies."

    "Look!" I exclaimed, and stopped short.  I pointed across the
street at the Memphis Light, Gas and Water office building.  Built
in the 1920's, it was famous for its thousands of 60-watt electric
bulbs that lined the frontage and the entrance marquis.  Onto the
sidewalk they cast a strong yellow light that shimmered in the rain
and glowed as brightly as the bulbs themselves.  "Look at that!  It
looks just like the ending of the movie tonight.  Remember John
Wayne whistling at the end, and walking down the sidewalk with all
the yellow lights?"

    She looked at me sternly and said, "No."

    "C'mon, let's walk in the yellow light."

    "Get under the umbrella," she said, harder now.

    "But what's wrong with me doin' it myself?"

    "Because," she said, louder and upset now, "I'm wearing a wool
sweater and it'll get wet and ruined and I can't afford another one!
Now get under here with me and stop making me so angry with you!"

    Surprised, I walked to her.  She scowled angrily and started
walking toward home.  For a tense moment we didn't say anything.  I
took the umbrella, offering to hold it for her, and she smiled
tightly and said, "Thank you, you're a gentleman," and we walked
under the umbrella together.  I looked at her.  She looked straight
ahead and wouldn't look at me.  After a minute she took my arm and
put hers through it.

    "It wasn't you," she said.  "It was me.  Some things just remind
me that I'm poor.  I've worked so hard.  And I wear the same sweater
for six years, and the same shoes, and borrow clothes from more
fortunate girls with more money so I can look for work.  And all I
do is work and I'm still not out of it.  And I don't have a job and
I looked for one all week.  But I won't quit school to take a
full-time job.  I applied for a job yesterday and the guy, the boss,
he had me in his office talking to me and he started telling me
about how demanding the job was, how there was all this clerical
work and he said I could have it but I'd probably have to cut some
of my classes if I wanted the work because it took so-and-so many
hours a week.   Well...I told him there was no chance I'd quit any
of my classes, and he said, well, he could make a little deal.  A
little deal, he said.  There would be a little something extra,
after hours, and he could pay me for it.  He could pay me a lot for
it, he said.  And the way he was looking at me...He knew I was
desperate.  He could tell I needed the job.  So he was going to
make me a little deal.  A little after hours deal.  Oh, Speedy,
sometimes I hate being pretty.  I hate being trapped.  Evelyn's
getting successful now, people are finding out how good she is at
her job, and when a man looks at her like that and wants to make a
little deal she can just tell him to shove it.  I can't do that
yet.  I can't say that without losing out.  So I passed it up.
I told him thanks but no thanks.  And I walked out.  But I didn't
want to say thanks -- I wanted to say 'shove it, mister'.  I
didn't even get that much satisfaction out of it.  All I could do
was walk away from it and just forget about it."

    I didn't know what to say, so I walked with her silently and
put my hand on the arm she had locked in mine.

    "I'm getting too desperate.  I want it too much.  I have to stop
wanting it so much.  You were having such a good time and I don't
often see you feeling that good.  I didn't mean to stop you.  I
might have even been...a little jealous, seeing you let go and
watching you say 'screw you' to the world."

    She simmered down and walked silently for a moment.

    "Hey," I said.  "I've got a Hank Williams album at home my Aunt
Frances bought me."

    She smirked at me.  "Well, you certainly know how to change the
subject, don't you?  You don't fool around."

    I shrugged. "I guess you said what you wanted to say."

    She hugged me.  "You know something?  You're a pretty cool guy.
I kinda like you."

    I winked at her.

    She winked back.  "So, you want to play Hank Williams and turn
out the lights and watch the rain?"

    "Sounds nice."

    "You, uh, wanna do it nekkid?"

    I looked at her, then cleared my throat.  I blushed.

    "What's wrong?" she asked.  "Oh, don't tell me I embarrassed
you!  Oh my lord, you have to be kidding!  "

    "I kinda thought, after the story you just told me..."

    "I was talking about a greaser who was taking advantage of me
and girls like me.  He had an office full of them, all practically
the same age.  I wasn't talking about you.  You're different.
We're different.  You know that."

    I shook my head.  "Maybe I'm too young.  Sometimes girls are,
uh, verrry mysterious."

    "You don't seem to have a problem understanding me...most of
the time."

    "Most of the time," I said.

    "Okay.  We'll go home.  Turn out the lights.  Play Hank
Williams.  Get nekkid.  And I'll tell you all you want to know
about 'us girls'."

    "Deal," I said.

    Sometime later, Martha Jane and I lay nude together in her
apartment, listening to the rain patter against her bedroom window.
The Hank Williams album had long since been played and replayed, and
she had explained to me a great deal about women, and different
kinds of women, and girls, and the way she thought about sex and
boys when she was my own age.  Then she wanted to know about boys;
specifically, she wanted to know about me; and more specifically she
wanted to know exactly what it was I liked best when she sucked me,
and after I told her she did it exactly that way. She did it so well
that I began feeling the now-familiar tightening and the pleasure
pangs and the lusty itch and told her I was starting to cum and that
she had to be careful because I was going to cum in her mouth if she
didn't stop.  Rather than stop, she kept sucking with a sweet
vengeance until she felt the first spurt.  Then she slowed, tanta-
lizing me, and in my dim state of consciousness as I emptied my bag
of cum into her mouth I heard her gulp and swallow until I fell back
and lay still.  With her hands and lips she drained all of me into
her and then lay beside me while I recovered.

    "So," she said, "now you know another way to cum."

    "I didn't think you wanted to swallow it."

    "Some girls don't.  I never sucked that boyfriend I told
you about.  But I wanted to now because it was you.  Your cum."

    "Oh, yeah," I murmured, "your boyfriend."

    "Don't be jealous, hon, I don't see him anymore."

    "Did you and him...?"

    "Yes.  Not very often.  And I made him use a rubber, and I
hated it."  She laid a gentle hand on my arm.  "Don't worry about
him.  It wasn't at all the way it is with you and me.  And I love
your dick without a rubber, it feels good inside me and it tastes
good sucking you."

    "Yeah?"

    "Yeah, dummy."

    "I thought I was finished cummin', but when I heard you swallow
I sort of starting all over again."

    "Is that what it was?  I thought it ended, too, and then you
squirted more."

    Not to be outdone, I told her there was still more I wanted to
know about women.  Specifically, about her.  Specifically, about her
most pleasurable spots and how she liked being licked.  Another half
hour went by as she spread her legs and educated me in the details
of her nipples and tummy and thighs and cunt.  She was much better
at explaining the technical details than I was at explaining my own,
though at one point she had to make me stop.  I asked her why and
she said, "It's so intense, I thought I was going crazy.  Hon, you're
getting so terribly good at this!"  After she rested she asked me to
keep going and explained more to me, although at times she was so
breathless I had trouble understanding her.  Eventually her sentences
made very little sense and she stiffened and quivered with a long cum.

    She explained the differences between how it felt when I made
her cum manually or orally, and how her outer lips were especially
sensitive right after she came, so since I was hard I entered her
and we started fucking slowly and she told me how wonderful it felt
to fuck after she had just cum.  She asked if it felt different for
me, now that I'd already cum once, and I said it felt more sensitive
but that I also felt more in control.  So we practiced learning how
we could tell when either of us would start cumming and how to stop
it but keep the pleasure going until we were ready to start again.
Both of us started a long climb that took us to an edge where we
didn't want to stop and couldn't, and I started squirting in her
when she was in the middle of her cum and her contractions milked me
so thoroughly that I didn't want to move when it was over.  For a
long time we held each other until she said she had to get her
little blue bag and go in the bathroom.  This time I didn't mention
rubbers, knowing how much she disliked them.

    When she came out she said she was okay and asked if I wanted to
fuck again.  It took a while to harden me, which she did with her
mouth and then by putting me half-hard inside her and moving under
me.  Less urgent and hysterical now, we were both almost clinical as
we talked and excited each other.  When I was hard enough I screwed
her the way she told me she liked, bringing her to an edge and then
changing my movements to slow her down, until finally she said she
wanted to cum, so I moved in her the way she wanted and didn't stop
until she came.  I let her rest a minute and started again, keeping
her on the edge, and finally she came again and almost fainted.  I
was thoroughly drained by then and didn't cum, though I was close a
few times and highly sensitized.  At that point I needed rest more
than I needed another orgasm.

    For a while we talked sleepily, listening to the rain that still
slopped outside the window.  She put her head on my chest and I
found out how to massage her temples with my thumbs.  I caressed her
that way until I knew she was asleep.  Watching her doze on me was a
marvel.  Filled with tenderness, I continued stroking and touching
her, finding the exact shape of her gentle shoulders and her back,
playing in her hair, learning the wonder of the hollows and curves
of her trim waist and flared hips.  Her deep and steady breathing
became my music for the night, along with the waning rain.  I didn't
want to fall asleep right away.  I wanted to keep holding her and
listening.  I wanted the night to go on.  I considered staying awake
all night and would not allow myself to fall asleep; this would make
the night last longer, I reasoned, and by morning it wouldn't matter.

    But I was asleep before I knew it.  I found myself in the middle
of the universe again.  I was floating.  Somewhere in the distance I
heard the hum, almost imperceptibly, and I thought this time I would
wake up and pay attention and I would know what it was.  But then
the dark that had no shape began changing and not changing shape and
I thought: no no here it comes again --

    I was standing in her kitchen.  Panting.  I gulped, trying to
figure out how I got there.  Behind me I heard her bare feet running
toward the room.  She whispered frantically, "Where are you?
Speedy, where did you go?"

    Turning, I saw her arrive in the doorway, and then she came
toward me quickly.  I stumbled to her and as soon as I felt her
nakedness against me I clasped her tightly and wanted to disappear
into her breasts.

    "Sweetheart, what's wrong?  You almost knocked me off the bed,
you jumped out and ran so fast!  I never saw anyone run so fast!"

    "I dreamed this before," I gasped.

    "Of course you were dreaming, hon, of course. Are you okay now?"

    "I dreamed this before," I repeated,  I held more tightly.  One
hand at her back, my other held her by her smoothly globed buttocks
and pressed her into me voraciously.  She reciprocated and writhed
into me.  Her pliant body fit into me as if her flesh and bones were
part of mine.  My cock was incredibly hard against her pubic hair.

    "Hon, your heart's beating so fast!  What's wrong?"

    "I had this dream before," was all I could say.  I let go of her
and pulled her by the hand and led her back into the bedroom. "I'm
okay, I'm...waking up.  I'm okay."  Still holding her hand I gest-
ured for her to climb in, and when she was in the bed on her back I
pulled her knees wide and opened her legs and fell on her, clasping
her as tightly as before, my face in her neck, mashing her tight
breasts against me.  Frantically, realizing I had little control
over what I was doing and that it may have been part of the dream, I
searched for her with my cock, which was painfully erect.

    "You want me hon?" she asked.  "Want me?  Wait...let me get
wet."  She licked her palm and I felt her rub herself with it but
I knew that wouldn't make her wet enough so I scooted down and
licked her--slowly, thinking that she'd get naturally wetter if I
did it the way she liked, and after only a few seconds she said,
"Good, hon.  Hurry inside me."

    I moved up again, quickly, lunging with my cock and missing.
Her hand helped, and I went straight in.  Doing something I had
never done before and had never thought of doing, I put my hands
under her butt and hid my face in her neck and fucked her
rapidly, deeply, hungrily.  She said "Yes, hon, it's good, it's
good," and right away I came.  It was not a long or a very wet cum,
but it was blindingly intense and as always she milked me with her
cunt when she felt me throb in her.

    Then I simply lay gasping on her, afraid to let go, amazed at
how I had just fucked her so thoroughly and completely and quickly.
She caressed my neck and back.

    "What was wrong?" she whispered.

    "I don't know what it is," I moaned into her neck.

    "But what did you dream, hon?"

    "I don't know what it is," I said again.

    "Are you okay now?"

    "Yes.  I came in you.  You'd better go in the bathroom."  I
started to move for her, but she stopped me.

    "No.  Not until you're asleep again."

    "I'm okay, go ahead."

    "Shhh.  I won't leave you in here alone."  She put a hand on
my back and one on my rear and pressed me into the pliant, warm,
clinging length of her and squeezed her cunt on me.  Then she
rested and held me.

    I more than slept: I fell unconscious.  I woke much later as
the birds were just beginning to sing in the dark.  Their song
meant the sun would rise soon.  The rain had stopped.  Martha Jane
lay next to me on her side, one arm around my waist.  Her face was
toward mine, eyes closed, lips softly parted, hair splayed on the
pillow.  I kissed her cheek very lightly, not wanting to disturb her.
Faintly I could smell her body on me and felt her dried moisture
between my legs.  I put my hand on her waist and slept again.

    In the morning we woke and bathed together and I made breakfast
again.  As we ate I was unable to explain my dream to her, though I
tried.  She got dressed and went to the supermarket and I went to my
apartment and got my bed ready for her.  Late in the morning she
returned and we got back into bed, this time at my place.  She
grinned as we embraced and said, "We owe the old place one more try
before you're gone."  I was still a little tired and she wanted to
talk about my dream, but I stopped her by fingerfucking her until
she had a prolonged orgasm during which her hot and frantic whispers
never stopped.  Then she was very tired, and we rested and made
lunch, then got back into bed and napped for half an hour.  We got
up and bathed again.  Though still tired, I asked if we could fuck
again and she smiled and led me back to bed.  Languidly she lay back
with her thighs spread flat and watched me as I steadily fucked her.
I wanted to learn more about how I could tell I'd be cumming.  I
stroked lazily in her until I tired again, but I still didn't cum.
She moved me to the edge of the bed and lay on top of me, moving
gently on me, first in circles for a while and then up and down until
she was tired as well.  Having her on top left me more rested and
very erect and horny, so I moved her to her back on the edge of the
bed and with her legs dangling to the floor I stood between her
thighs and found the bed just high enough to let me stand and enter
her deeply.

    She lay restfully and looked down to watch, one hand behind her
head and the other stroking the exposed part of my shaft.  I stood
between her outstretched legs, marveling at how the skin of her inner
thighs now had a tight, athletic tone and flesh that whispered faintly
as I stood and pistoned gently in her snug wetness and watched her
subtly arch her mound up and down.  Finally, almost out of breath, I
could feel my shaft start twitching.

    She asked, "Are you close?"

    "...Yes..."

    "Wait," she said, smiling devilishly.  She held my hips to make
me stop thrusting and then she sat up a little, saying "I've always
wanted to do this."  Biting her lip girlishly, she looked into my
eyes and held my half-immersed shaft with one hand and with her
other fingers she pressed the muscles under my balls.

    "Cum in me this way, hon," she said.  "Let me jack you off
into me."  With that, she began gently but quickly masturbating
me with half my cock in her.

    All I could do was throw my head back and moan.

   Her breasts jiggled as she swiftly but neatly jacked me off
with three slender fingers while rapturously studying my face.

   "Oh, I"m...Oh, it's so close!"

   "hon...I can't believe how wonderfully wicked this feels."

    She jacked me some more, not strongly, just enough to carry me
along an almost painfully slow, irresistible glide into a long and
libidinous cum, which finally arrived with a smashing wave of sensa-
tion at the tip of my cock where the wet ring of her outer lips held
me and warmly, subtly clung; my knees weakened and bent, and uncon-
trollably I leaned back with my cock and hips extended toward her,
my tummy tightening.  I watched helplessly as my knees moved out and
spread my thighs lewdly; and with a jerk of my hips a blob of cum
shot out of me like a bullet.

    She felt it pulse along my shaft.

    "There, baby, theeerrrr...mmm, you're cummin' so good, hon...
..Mmm!"  She beamed up at me, surprise and lust flooding her face.
She gently squeezed my balls.   "I feel it," she murmured glutton-
ously, highly satisfied with herself.  She watched my cock and
continued draining me.  "This is so good."

    Soon she could tell from my glazed eyes and the weakening of my
throbs that I had peaked, so she slowed her smooth squeezing and
stroked my chest as I finished.

    Then I collapsed on her.  I was emptied, and completely out of
breath.

    She gave a low chuckle as I rested, still standing but bent over
her with my face in her neck as she lay on the bed with her legs
hanging over the side.

    She said, "Hey, you animal, you really liked that, didn't you?"

    I nodded, struggling to get my breath.

    She chuckled again, contentedly.  "Oh my, so did I.  I was so
surprised at myself!"

    I panted into her neck, "You always...make it feel so good."

    She whispered, "Yes, and I want to, because you make it good for
me.  You always do--it's like a fuck fantasy come true.  It's very
special, the way we please each other, the way you always seem to
just...know."

    I craned my neck and gave her a long kiss on the cheek.

    By that afternoon, when we started straightening up for the
return of our relatives, both of us were saying we probably wouldn't
want to have another orgasm for months.

    Of course, we were both wrong about that.


                                Continued...


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