Double Take
Part III: Perambulation
Chapter 23
“The first rule in the book of love is acceptance.”
—Destinee Hardwick, Wishing on Raining Stars
I DIDN’T KNOW what to expect when we went back to school on Wednesday, January second. It was almost like New Year’s didn’t exist. Even the teachers weren’t ready to be back yet. But there we were.
I glanced around the cafeteria as I carried my lunch bag with me to our accustomed table. A lot of chatter flowed from table to table as kids gathered for the first school lunch of the new year. There were noticeable new outfits being worn—obvious or not so obvious Christmas presents. I used my cane as I navigated to the table but was more and more confident of my ability to walk stably.
The first to arrive at the table after me was Joan.
“Do you mind?” she asked as she settled opposite me.
“No? Are you going to be a regular with us?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. I haven’t seen Rebeca all through break. I don’t know.” I thought that was an interesting perspective. Perhaps she’d know when Rebeca arrived? It made no difference to me because Rachel slid in next to me and leaned over to plant a kiss on my cheek.
“Miss me?” she cheerfully asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Oh yeah. We’re going to have so much fun this spring!”
“Um… about that… I’m not sure…”
“Jacob, do you like me?”
“Well, yeah. That was never an issue.”
“Is Rebeca your girlfriend?”
“Not exactly. She’s my friend.”
“Are you in love with Francie?”
“No. That’s not the point.”
“Shut up and kiss me.” She pulled my face around and planted a kiss on my lips that almost went to my tonsils. “I like you. I’m not going to make you stop being Beca’s friend. I like her, too. I’m not going to get in the way of whatever you and Francie are doing. I’m not pledging my lifelong love, my virtue, or my soul to you. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
“Okay.” Hell! Why not! I reached an arm around her and laid another kiss on her that was almost too much for the cafeteria. A voice being cleared behind me snapped us out of it.
“I hope you’re at least going to hold her hand when you walk to class after that,” Beca laughed.
“Um… Yeah.”
She slid into the seat beside me and when Joan looked at her plaintively she held up a finger to forestall the blonde before grabbing hold of my arm with both hands.
“How soon can we get DVDs? Do we need to run to Staples?” she asked excitedly.
“They’re about five dollars cheaper by the spindle if I get them from Amazon,” I answered. It was part of our project research and I’d looked up the cost for a spindle of writeable DVDs to have the security recordings transferred to.
“As soon as we have them in hand, we can start getting the security footage.”
“Really? I can order them through Amazon Prime and have them waiting for us tomorrow afternoon. Why do we need them so soon?” I asked. I assumed that if we got permission to even view the security tapes it wouldn’t be until next semester.
“Mr. Richards held me after class this morning. He got permission for us to have the recordings. Here’s what happens. The two hours of video during lunch is recorded direct to rewriteable DVD. It’s held for one week and if not needed for incident resolution they are recycled. He says that once we have blank DVDs in the pipeline, we will receive the DVDs after the one-week waiting period instead of having them recycled.”
“That’s cool! With two spindles, we could have ten weeks’ worth of video to work with. We should be able to extract a lot of information from that!” I was really happy they’d approved the project. This was the kind of ‘research’ that wasn’t going to lead to a lot of social change or policy decisions on the part of the school. It was pure research for a class project and the school decided it couldn’t hurt.
“Order them now if you can,” she said. “We could have two weeks of baseline information before this semester ends. Then we can compare that to the new groupings that emerge in second semester.”
“I thought over the holiday that we should plot our information according to other axes,” I said. “We should correlate the data according to the day of the week and any special events that are occurring, like ball games.”
“You might as well include what’s on the menu,” Joan said flatly. “I’m sure that affects the traffic pattern.” We looked up at the blonde and Beca quickly ran around the table to sit beside her and give her a hug.
“That’s so smart!”
“You don’t need to act surprised. I do well in my classes and I had Human Geography my freshman year as well. It’s the only freshman class you can get AP credit for without retaking. I’m retaking it next year,” Joan said. I was surprised. My view of her was entirely based on the observed behavior in the lunchroom and at the dance. I considered her a first-degree airhead. She was actually speaking intelligently.
“Do you want to be my assistant? If this comes off well, you can probably use it for extra credit when you retake,” Beca said.
“Um… Yeah… sure. I’ve got time to burn.”
“Do you need an assistant, too?” Rachel whispered in my ear. She blew softly and I responded hardly.
“Do you want to assist me?” I asked.
“If it would get me more invitations to your house and the possibility of sneaking off alone together, I’m pretty sure I could find time.”
“Wow.”
Friday morning, we handed over two spindles of DVDs and received the five from the week before Christmas and the two days we were in class the week vacation started. We already had seven DVDs from each of four cameras to review.
“I’ve got a big TV with DVD player,” Joan said. Her voice still sounded flat as if she didn’t want us to notice any contribution she made. “You could come over after school for a while and we can watch.”
“Ooh. She wants to watch,” Rachel teased. “Can we give her something interesting to watch?”
“My mom will be watching, too,” Joan said. “She’s like that.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but we agreed that we’d meet at Joan’s house Saturday afternoon, assuming we could all get permission from our parents. Of course, Mom and Dad were accepting if not enthusiastic. Em agreed to take me over. Saturday was the day that Mom and Dad did everything to keep the house running, like grocery shopping and maintenance.
Joan’s house was big. It was in a community of big houses that each looked like it was built on its own hill so the lord of the castle could look out at the lands around. By all appearances, Joan’s family was rich.
“Hi,” she said when I rang the bell. “Rachel and Bec are in the TV room. You want a drink?”
“I’m good for now. Thanks for having us over, Joan.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
I was blown away. The TV room featured a flat screen that was five feet wide. The girls had already loaded one video and were watching kids from the first lunch hour stream into the room. They were laughing at something and Rachel was pointing to a guy in the cafeteria line with two trays. As we watched, we saw him sit down and pile the food all together. Both trays were for him!
“Jacob!” Rachel squealed when she saw me. She rushed over and gave me a very big kiss that I was ready to continue. Hell with the videos.
“Ahem,” Beca said. “The rest of us would like to say hi, too.” Rachel stepped back and blushed. Beca stepped up and gave me a hug. “We came over a little early and got the first video on just to see what the angles were. I thought we were going to have to watch eight hours per day, but they record each camera in a window so all four angles play at the same time. It’s pretty cool. If you spot something on one camera, you can immediately look at the other windows and get a different angle on it.” I watched for a minute and switched from window to window to see what was going on from different angles. It would make things easier.
We sat to watch and talk about the parameters of the study, outlining what we were interested in and how we could collect data as well as images. Once we got into it, we discovered we could run the feed at x3 and only take about forty minutes to look at the full two hours. Occasionally, someone would shout ‘Stop.’ And we’d freeze the frame to point out an interesting move. They weren’t always things that were relevant to our study.
“That guy is so looking up her skirt,” Rachel said. “Look. He drops something on the floor every few minutes and ducks down to look under the table.”
“So, is she showing him anything?” Joan asked. “Like, is she keeping her knees together or spreading them to give him a better view?”
“You think she knows what he’s doing?”
“Probably. Guys are always looking up my skirt. Or down my blouse. I can usually pick out which ones.”
“Does it bother you?” Beca asked. “I wear jeans and am not interested in giving guys beaver shots.”
“That guy would bother me because he’s being so damned obvious. Unless she’s playing him, she should kick him in the nose the next time he ducks under the table. Usually, it doesn’t bother me because I dress like that to get noticed. If I decide on a guy I want to date, sometimes I’ll give him a little panty shot,” Joan said.
“At least you wear panties,” I growled. “It’s indecent. We should report him.”
“Dude! We’re not the security reviewers. We’re here to find patterns for your Human Geography project, not to police the lunchroom,” Rachel said.
“If we take anything back to security, they’ll stop giving us the disks,” Beca said. “They were pretty clear about that when I picked them up.”
“Do you kids need anything?” Joan’s mother asked from the door. “We’ve got chips and sodas or if you want something healthier, I have a vegetable platter I could pull out.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Long,” Beca said. I turned to look at the woman. Oh, fucking hell.
Sharon Long was an older version of her daughter. In her mid-forties, she was remarkably young looking. She wore trim slacks and a blue silk blouse that was demurely buttoned almost to her throat. Her blonde hair was cut in a bob, unlike Joan’s shoulder length curls. Her makeup was perfect and her nails looked like she’d just come from a salon. Maybe she had.
But that wasn’t what caught me. There was something else about her that jerked V1 to life inside me. I knew she had a small scar under her left shoulder blade. I knew she wore a size eight shoe. I knew there was a tiny mole on the inside of her left thigh just below her pussy.
I’d had an affair with Sharon Long forty years ago.
I guess I’d been having a midlife crisis, which is what it’s called whenever a forty-year-old man decides to buy a fast car and cat around with other women. I was the go-to guy for resolving all kinds of mechanical problems on the assembly lines. I drew up plans for new installations and was onsite to supervise. Sharon worked in the office on one of my jobsites.
She was good. I mean at her job. If I was meeting or on the phone and needed a specific drawing, she was always right there with it. Coffee magically appeared by my hand whenever my cup was empty. She had a calm voice that kept me from flying off the handle when an assembly fell apart due to a worker’s gross stupidity. And she was sexy as hell.
In the late seventies, fashions in the office weren’t as flashy as on campus or in high school. She dressed professionally, usually in slacks with a blouse and jacket. Sometimes she wore a straight skirt that clung to her curves down to her knees. Heels about two inches high shaped her calves into a sensuous curve.
We laughed when we could and flirted outrageously. And one night as I was going over the drawings for phase two of our project, she stepped behind me and began rubbing my shoulders. I relaxed into her hands and she leaned down to whisper in my ear. I could smell her perfume, White Shoulders, she’d told me.
“Wanna get lucky?” she asked as she continued to knead my shoulder muscles.
“I can’t think of anything luckier than you,” I said.
Our first time was right there in the office on my desk. It wasn’t romantic or loving. We had raw sex with most of our clothes still on. And we continued to have good sex for most of the month I was there. Thinking about her juicy slit still made my dick hard.
There was no sign of recognition from Sharon. No flirtation. No indication that she knew me from another life. This was a different reality. If she looked at me at all, she probably just saw another of her daughter’s unending stream of high school boys who she’d never see again.
One thing was for sure. If given the opportunity, I’d fuck Sharon again.
We finished up and had a pretty good plan of attack for our research project. Of course, nearly all of it would be on Beca’s or my computer. Rachel and Joan had their own classes to worry about and as laid back as Joan appeared, the truth was she worked hard in school. Rachel was taking Beca and me home but at the door, Joan plucked my sleeve.
“You want to fuck her, don’t you,” Joan said. I looked toward Rachel. “My mother. All the boys want to fuck her. You should know that she’s pretty good at shooting them down. The first time.”
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“Oh, go ahead and ask her. She won’t tell. Just don’t expect anything else to happen. She’ll point you back at me first. Or maybe one of them. She doesn't get really interested until I am.”
“Is that why you have a different boy each week?” I asked.
“I really don’t want to date someone who has the hots for my mom.”
First off, I had to dismiss Sharon Long from my mind. I wasn’t the same person I was when we had an affair. She certainly was not the same person I remembered. She was Joan’s mother. I wasn’t sure I could call Joan a friend yet, but she had definitely been adopted by Beca.
Second, I needed to deal with Rachel. And I mean right damn now!
She furnished the transportation home, only after she dropped Beca off, she didn’t head straight for my place.
“Where are we going, Rache?” I asked.
“It’s Saturday night. Let’s have a date.”
“Really? I didn’t wear good clothes or come prepared for a big date.”
“Call home and tell your parents you’re having dinner with me. Come on, Jacob. Let’s go have some fun.”
Fun is just what we had. We went to a local bowling alley and headed to their game room. I couldn’t really swing a sixteen-pound ball yet and wanted to be more stable on my right leg before I tried. I always liked to bowl and was welcome on my league team to add a dependable 200 to our score. We’d come back for that when I was stronger.
Until then, we were in a room full of noise and blinking lights. She led me to a favorite pinball machine and showed me the ropes. Pinball was something I’d never played, at least not on machines as fancy as these. I remembered a game from the sixties but it had just a left and right flipper and a bunch of targets that lit up. I had the low score on the board.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said when Rachel stepped out of the way for Player 2 to take over.
“Just let it rip and do what comes naturally,” she said. I pulled the lever and the action was on. Reflex took over. I could hardly keep my eye on the ball and when two came into play, I lost track entirely.
“Wow!” I said when I stepped away, having lost my last ball.
“I give up,” Rachel said. “The way you were suckering me, you should have made a big bet for sexual favors. I’d be naked by now.”
“I really don’t know how I did that,” I said looking back at the machine one last time to see my record score still flashing on it. “I just stepped up and let go. Now about those sexual flavors of yours.”
“Favors! And we didn’t make a bet.”
“I’d still like to taste you.” I kissed her and poured my heart into it.
“Oh, God, yes!” she breathed. She pushed me away and caught her breath. “Jacob, I really do want to have sex with you. The past few weeks have taught me that it wasn’t just a passing flirtation. I think that’s true of you, too. It’s not that I’m a virgin or anything like that, but I have my own fantasies about what making love with you would be like and they don’t include balling in the backseat of a Toyota. At least not the first time. Let’s um… date and… make out for a while before I give you a taste of anything but my lips. You’re really good at this, like you were with Algebra and pinball. At the rate we’re going, we could be living together before you’re sixteen. I think you’d better check to see if that’s okay with your folks.”
“What about your folks?” I laughed.
“Oh, they’d scream and holler,” she chuckled. “And then they’d probably be head over heels in love with the idea of having you for a son-in-law.”
“Son-in-law. Wow! That really puts it in perspective.”
“Finally shocked you, eh? Look, you’re fifteen and I’m sixteen. We have five years before we can expect to do anything serious. I don’t mean fucking. I hope we do that sooner. I mean relationships. If I was in your Human Geography class, I’d try to do an analysis of what mandatory service does to relationships and redistribution of population. Of course, I’d probably need a four-year grad school research grant to make any sense of that.”
“It’s hard enough making sense of our lunch room. Rachel, you turn me on like crazy. You’re the only girl in my peer group that does. Beca is like a little sister. Joan… well, it’s difficult not to get a little turned on when she does her displays, but she as a person doesn’t do anything for me. You are like… You rock my socks off.”
“What about Francie?”
“She’s special but we both know there is nothing between the two of us that has the potential to last beyond her baby’s birth. It just… That’s not in our relationship.”
“I’ll accept that. But I might wait until after her baby is born before I’m ready to go all the way with you.”
6 January 2019
If I let myself get carried away, I’d fall in love. I’m already deeply in lust. I find my hormones in conflict with my reasoning. I should be able to control this much better. From the first day she whispered in my ear, I’ve had her on my mind.
Playing pinball was another thing that I seemed to have a muscle memory for. I don’t remember how to play but I remember playing. It all just becomes natural. It’s like the guitar. As long as I don’t think about it, I can play some cool stuff. If I so much as glance at my fingers, I freeze. I’m hoping Vinnie will be able to give me some pointers at my lesson when I start them. I really like the guitar and I’d like to connect more fully to it.
It seems that my life is all about memory and relationships. As I remember things, the relationships have more clarity. I guess I’ll just have to let go of my head when I’m with her and do what comes naturally, like with pinball and the guitar. Maybe I’m overthinking it.
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