Swimming Sweet Arrow Part 6

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I told him. "I'm just resting."

We lay there, his hand brus.h.i.+ng back and forth over my hip. It was peaceful in the darkness.

"What are you thinking about?" I said.

"I'm thinking how smooth your skin is."

When he said it, I wondered how he had learned to do that, to say exactly the right thing. I wondered if it was a thing all pretty boys just knew how to do.

I climbed on top of him then, but when he went to touch me, I took his hands in mine and moved them above his head, pinning them against the mattress. He struggled against my weight for a second, and then he understood what I was doing, and he let me hold him down. I kissed him and I moved my body over his body, but I did not let him touch me with his hands.

I had just gotten him up inside me, and had my nipple-on my good breast, not the one where he'd almost bitten through the skin-in his mouth when I started talking to him.

"Am I your ten-point buck?"

"What?"

"Am I your ten-point buck," I said.

"You know you are."

"Not a doe?"

"Not a doe."

"All right," I said. "I'll be a buck. But don't you forget."

"What, honey?"

"I let you catch me."

"So you did," he said. "So you did."

We f.u.c.ked then, me rocking on him and stopping, rocking and stopping. We did it a long time, and I kept feeling like I was dripping down around him. I'd never felt that wet before just from s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, and I couldn't get enough of the feeling. It was not like coming, but something in me just kept opening and opening.

After a time, Del couldn't take it anymore. I let him move his hands, and he wrapped his arms around my back so he could f.u.c.k hard up into me. There were no more words then, no more talk, but I'd already heard everything I wanted to hear.

My ten-point buck-to anyone else, it probably would have sounded stupid, calling a woman a deer. But I'd seen Del's face there in the Ruby when he said it the first time, and I had his c.o.c.k up inside me when I made him say it again. I never forgot the bruises, but I never forgot those words, either.

12.

THE following weekend, June called. She asked how I was, but by that time things had settled down between Del and me. My bruises were two weeks old and almost gone, and it seemed pointless to go into the whole thing. I figured she had enough on her plate. "I've been better, but I've been worse," I told her. "How's the love nest?"

"Be serious, Vangie. I need to talk to you."

"I'm listening," I said.

She told me they'd gone out s.h.i.+ning deer, she and Luke and Ray. She didn't like the way they used the lights against the deer, but she was glad she went anyway.

"I wanted to sit between the two of them," she said. "I wanted to know what it felt like."

And of course it wasn't the leg of the one who already was her lover that she concentrated on when it pressed against hers, and it wasn't his warmth she missed when he got out of the truck to check a stand.

When they got back to the house, she stayed out on the porch to smoke, because she didn't want to go in the house, not yet, not for another night. Luke came out to find her, and they stood smoking in the dark air while Ray was inside.

June said they didn't talk at all. She said she heard Luke move before she felt his touch. Then his hand was there, reaching under her hair to the nape of her neck.

"His fingers were so cool and smooth, Vangie," she said.

She told me she was sure then that Luke had to know her in a way no one else knew her, because that was her favorite place to be touched-her neck and her face and her hair-and Ray never touched her there.

"Do you know what I'm saying?"

"I know," I said, and it was a lie and it was the truth. I knew what it meant to be touched in a way you liked, but I didn't know what it meant to June to be touched by Luke. There was no way for me to know.

She told me she and Luke had s.e.x for the first time the next morning, after Ray left for work. She went to Luke's room, and they f.u.c.ked in Luke's bed. She said it wasn't like anything she ever did.

That was all she told me. It wasn't like when we were in high school and we recounted every detail.

"Say something," she said at the end.

"I'm glad you found someone. I'm glad you love him."

"But?"

"But nothing. Just be careful."

She laughed at that. "You mean if I can't be good, be careful?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"I'll call when I can," she said. "When I have something new to tell."

But I didn't hear from her again for a long time.

13.

DEL and I crossed some kind of line the night he called me a buck. Maybe it had to do with me trusting him again, or maybe it had to do with me pinning him to the mattress. I didn't know. What I was sure of was that our s.e.x changed.

If it had happened earlier, I might have been scared, because I wouldn't have known how to want the things we began to do. And maybe I should have been frightened that Del wanted to take so much from my body, because of the bruising and all. But I was not frightened. I wanted everything we did.

It started with talk, with words. One night I came home from Dreisbach's and found that-surprise of surprises-Del had gotten home before me and had actually gone to bed. I snuck around the house in the dark, showering, combing out my hair, and Del didn't call out to me during any of it.

I thought for sure when I climbed into bed he was going to tell me he was sick, but when I slipped beside him and wrapped myself around his back, he said, "Do you want some of my c.o.c.k?"

I was still damp from my shower, and it felt good to take him in my arms, he was so dry and warm. I could smell that he'd been smoking weed, but I didn't care-when he got stoned he was never rough, and he could f.u.c.k for a long time. I kissed his shoulder blades and shoulders, then I reached over his arm to his belly and down to his c.o.c.k, which was hard and warm.

"I want this," I said.

"How do you want me to f.u.c.k you?"

"I want to be able to kiss you."

"Do you want me to eat your p.u.s.s.y?"

"You know I do."

"Ask for it then, because you know I will if you ask."

"Do I have to ask?"

"I like to hear you say it."

"Then Del, will you eat my p.u.s.s.y?"

He moved away from me in the bed, away from my hand holding his c.o.c.k, and turned on the light.

"Could you kneel, Vangie? I want to see it."

So I got on my hands and knees, and he knelt behind me.

"You know how you look right now? You look all fat and wet. Is that what you want me to eat?"

"That's what I want you to eat."

So he did. He ate me, fingered me, and he f.u.c.ked me. I didn't know if I was going to feel his tongue or his fingers or his c.o.c.k.

It got to be a game between us, that position. Sometimes Del would have me kneel but leave my panties on. He'd tease me by kissing me through the fabric or pulling the sides of the crotch enough aside to kiss my skin-but not far enough to kiss my wetness. When he did finally take my panties down, he'd do it slow, inch by inch, kissing me as he went. And he'd tease me about how wet I was.

"If I put my finger inside you and you're wet, you know what you're going to have to do."

I'd ask what, and each time it was different. Sometimes he told me he was going to have to spank me. He'd hit me with his hand hard enough to hurt, but not too hard. Other times he'd tell me I had to suck his b.a.l.l.s. Once he said something to me, and it took me a while to even put the words together.

"If your p.u.s.s.y's wet, you're going to have to swallow my f.u.c.k," he said, and for some reason, those words stayed on my mind for a long time after.

In that position, it was also just a hop and a skip and a jump to f.u.c.king me in the a.s.s, and Del learned to do that so it never hurt. He'd use his tongue first, then get out the K-Y jelly and use his fingers.

One night, after he was all the way in, I told him, "My p.u.s.s.y gets lonely when we do it like this."

"We need to get you a d.i.l.d.o so I can treat your p.u.s.s.y right."

"Naw, I just want you," I said.

But when he brought a d.i.l.d.o home-a bright orange one that looked clowny to me-I let him use it. It all felt so good, being full up in there, and being full up in there. Though I never felt this way at night, when I saw the stuff beside the bed in the morning-the pink-orange d.i.l.d.o that was the color of no one's skin, the crimped-up tube of jelly, the black c.o.c.k ring that we were just starting to use-I felt embarra.s.sed and kind of sickened. Other times seeing our toys made me feel like a woman, like Del and I had secrets that no one at Dreisbach's or in Mennonite Town or in all of Mahanaqua could guess at.

I think Del was embarra.s.sed about the d.i.l.d.o, too, but not in the same way I was. He just never wanted to wash the thing. He wanted it to be there magically on our nightstand, and he wanted to be able to put it anywhere in me-but he didn't want to know too many details.

"You don't want me to get an infection, do you?" I said when he asked me why I was wiping the thing down with alcohol the first time.

"What are you talking about?"

So we had to have a talk about how he couldn't go from my a.s.s to my p.u.s.s.y, not with a d.i.l.d.o and not with his c.o.c.k, and he got kind of p.i.s.sed about the whole thing. He wanted to do whatever he liked in any sequence he liked.

"Why do you have to make it so complicated?"

"I'm just telling you what I read," I said.

So I was in charge of cleanup, and I was the one who had to say no and scoot away sometimes. Sometimes Del did the stuff anyway, and I'd spend the next couple days smelling myself, trying to see if my odor changed the way my pamphlet from the Ontelaunee clinic said it would if I had an infection. But my smell never changed, and I was not always sorry when Del crossed over my lines. If I was all caught up in what we were doing, it was hard for me to say no. Sometimes I wanted him to go on touching me and touching me, playing in my p.u.s.s.y and my a.s.s, and I did not say no to anything. I wanted what I wanted, too.

I SAW more of June's brother than I did of June those days. Kevin wasn't exactly a regular, but when he did come in to the restaurant, he always sat at my tables, he always asked me how I was, and he always gave me a compliment. It was the same kind of flirting everyone did with me, but over time I got to be more and more aware of Kevin. I was aware of him not only as a result of the stories about him, but also for the way he seemed to live within the stories that were told.

One night, right after I got b.i.t.c.hed at by Earl-because instead of just slapping salad into a bowl, I'd actually taken five extra seconds to arrange the tomato like a flower, which Earl thought was a waste of time-Kevin seemed to know things were rough.

"He should be glad you work here," he told me. "You're the best thing about this place."

It was nice to hear the words after just getting screamed at, and I wanted to be nice to him back. So I said, "The best thing, huh? Well, where have you been all my life?"

"In prison."

At first it felt like a bomb had dropped, but then I realized that was why Kevin said it. It wasn't like people didn't already have it on their minds as soon as they saw him, so it was his to joke about if he wanted.

I said, "Was the food any better there?"

He didn't say anything to that, but he smiled, and I knew I had been right to say it.

That comment sort of broke the ice, and I came to see him as a kind of friend. If I had the time, I would sometimes grab a cup of coffee and sit with Kevin at his table. The only other person I felt safe doing that with was Bill Mahlon, because he was older than my dad. But I felt safe doing it with Kevin, too, in spite of everything, because he was June's brother and because I felt that I knew the worst there was to know about him. In a way, that made me like him, because there was no secret about him. I still was scared of him, but I knew that people could be more than one thing at a time. I didn't think what he let happen to June when she was ten was right, but he was also the person who had been tender with her when she was eight, driving her around until she got dizzy watching the sky. He committed a crime, but he'd served time for it. He was what he was.

Kevin and I never talked about anything important anyway. Work and the weather. But kind people who peppered my day were a type of friend, and their compliments, or their teasing, or just the sight of their faces, meant something to me. No matter how busy we got, even if I overlooked him for a bit, Bill Mahlon was always patient and called me the Peekaboo Girl and made sure I got my dollar tip. The game warden who teased me about the time he caught me and June skipping school and swimming out at Sweet Arrow Lake always made sure I got a dollar tip from each of the guys at his table. Kevin Keel always said I was pretty in whatever color I had on that day and made sure I got my tip. I didn't give a s.h.i.+t if the reason they gave me money was because they could see the flowers on my underwear or not. Because as tough as I pretended to be, I still craved kindness, and I took it where I could find it.