Double Take
Part IV: Consummation
Chapter 35
“I won’t pressure you, Ari, but I’m not opposed to subtle acts of persuasion.”
—Siobhan Davis, Beyond Reach
I TEXTED EM as soon as I woke up Friday morning since she wasn’t home yet. “Boy or Girl?”
“Not yet.”
That was it. Apparently, Francie was still in labor. I wanted to rush over to the hospital and hold her hand but I didn’t even know which hospital she was at. Sometimes I cursed the fifteen-year-old I was living inside of for his negligence about details and total lack of follow-through.
Didn’t matter that he was dead.
What did matter was that I had to catch the school bus this morning since Em wasn’t home to drive. And that made me nervous. I figured I could put up with the kids on the bus. They wouldn’t be any different than the kids in school and I was doing fine with them. I guess I was considered a little aloof or maybe even just rude for ignoring most people, but I was on constant guard about my opinions and attitude around my classmates—even my girlfriends.
No, what was making me nervous was the fact of ‘bus’. I don’t know how dense V2 was, exactly, but I had no immediate recollection of the accident. I didn’t know if I’d stepped in front of a school bus or a city bus or fucking Greyhound.
When I got to the bus stop there were several kids around. Our little subdivision only had one stop and everyone was expected to be there. I stood well back away from the street clutching my backpack straps and waiting for the lumbering behemoth that would devour us and disgorge its meal at the high school. I suppose I would have had a better choice of seats if I’d gotten on first instead of last, but I just slid into the first open seat I came to.
“Did you get number seventeen?” the kid next to me asked. Seventeen? Was that the bus number? I turned to look at him. “The Geometry problems. Number seventeen.” It was Martin, the kid Mrs. Stierwalt suggested we include in our study group. We hadn’t made any overtures yet. I guess we forgot.
“Oh. Yeah. You need help? It’s congruence transformations. If you just take each point and map the transformations one at a time, you’ll have the image on the graph,” I said.
“I know.”
“I thought you wanted help.”
“I just wanted to know if you actually got it. It’s so damned boring.”
“Yeah. It can be. I’m learning some stuff, though, so I guess I don’t mind a class that’s easier. Honors English and AP Human Geography are taking most of my time,” I said.
“She gave me a bunch of extra problems to solve—like that would make up for being bored,” he sighed. “It’s just math. I wish we had something more theoretical. I’ve been working on the problem of trisecting an angle.”
“Didn’t we prove that was impossible last semester?”
“I’m not trying to prove it’s possible. I’m trying to see what I can learn from the attempts. Like how can a real number be irrational? If a line has the value of pi, how long is it? With the origin at 0,0 where is the endpoint. You can only get close.”
“But if it can be expressed as a ratio or a fraction, then it has to be real, doesn’t it?” I shot back. As far as I was concerned, I’d been a mechanical engineer. I was interested in things that worked and ten decimal places was as accurate as I’d ever needed to be in creating a gear.
“That’s the problem with trying to trisect an angle, see? One-third has no real value as it has an infinite decimal. You can’t plot it.”
“That’s when you change base. One-third has a finite value in base nine.”
It was all pretty much nonsense as the kid was simply exploring mental exercises, but it passed the time and we were at school pretty soon. Both of us knew the base you worked in didn’t have anything to do with constructing angles using Euclidean tools. I invited him to join our study group Sunday afternoon at my house just to have company while he was studying since I doubted we’d really spend that much time on Geometry. He agreed.
Having arrived at school on the bus, I didn’t have time before school to get warmed up before gym. Jock shot a look at me and I just shrugged and said, “Bus.” He got it and motioned me to start walking. After I was warmed up, I started jogging. I focused on keeping my form and stepping firmly on my weak leg. I was at the point where I could consistently jog three laps around the gym and then walk one. By the end of the forty-five minutes, though, I was beginning to question my choice of activities for my date with Joan that night.
She was in her fifth sailor suit and it was hot pink. I mean hot. This was the first of her little outfits that had a cropped sailor top that left a good part of her tummy exposed. The jewels in her navel were back and I guess the teachers counted that as not having her navel exposed. I wondered how the heck she got them to stay there and if she had a navel piercing.
“So, I need to know so I can wear the right outfit,” she said as I took her hand and led her over to our table instead of sitting at the table across from our usual.
“Okay. Well, it’s too cold to go sailing or sky diving,” I started.
“Sky diving? You’d take her sky diving?” Desi asked. “No way!”
“Yeah. Excuse me for nixing that one. I don’t see any reason to jump out of a perfectly good airplane,” Joan said. “I hope you thought of something more sensible than that or this will be the world’s shortest date.”
“Skating.”
“Rollerblades?”
“Nope. Old fashioned quads.”
“You roller skate?” Rachel asked.
“I hope so. I’m kind of depending on Joan to keep a really good grip on me so I don’t fall down,” I laughed. Joan breathed deep, which did wonderful things for the amount of skin that showed under her top.
“Come on, Joan!” Beca said. “You wanted to get him horizontal!”
“Yeah. But I didn’t want to bruise my butt doing it,” she glared at our little girlfriend. “Okay. This might still be a short date.”
I had to catch the bus home again after school and Martin had saved a seat for me. I sat next to him.
“So, are you some kind of alien?” he asked abruptly.
“What?” He couldn’t have meant anything by that, right?
“Math genius. I heard you can stop a bus with your bare hands.” I winced. “And you have like a dozen girlfriends. Superboy.”
“Only four,” I groused.
“Dude! Really?”
“Um… I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that when you come over on Sunday. If they thought I needed a dozen girlfriends, they’d probably try to get them. I don’t need that,” I said.
“My lips are sealed. It works, you know,” he said out of the blue.
“What works?”
“Graphing irrationals in different bases. I’m going to apply all the trisecting theories to base nine.”
“You’re kidding. I was just joking.”
“Yeah, but the thing it got me thinking of is that the problem isn’t where everyone approaches it. It’s more fundamental than whether you can trisect an angle; it’s whether you have the right tools. The problem isn’t in the math, but with the tools we’re given as restraints. I need to invent another tool.”
“I’d appreciate if you don’t reference me about that idea, either.”
“Yeah, like I’m going to thank alien Superboy in my Nobel Prize speech,” he laughed. We parted at the bus stop and I got home just half an hour before Pey.
I fretted around the house a while before getting ready for my date. I picked up my phone a couple of times to text Em but she’d sent me a text right near the end of school that said, “Turning off phone. This is it.”
Mom and Dad were home and getting dinner ready for Pey and them when my phone rang and I had it to my ear halfway through my “Sister, Sister” theme song ringtone.
“How is she?” I demanded.
“Whoa! Take it easy. You’d think you were the father. Francine is fine, but exhausted. Twenty-five hours of labor will do that to you. Baby is fine. William Jay Redmond, a whopping eight pounds four ounces and twenty-two inches long.”
“Willliam J.? What’s the J stand for?”
“Nothing. J-A-Y. Lighten up, brother. It was the best she could do.”
“Just, um… tell her we’re all thinking of her and can’t wait to meet William, I guess.”
“I will, J. Let me talk to Mom a sec.” I handed the phone to my Mom and she was all oohs and aahs. She hung up and handed me my phone just as the doorbell rang and I went to meet my date.
“Want to grab a burger before we hit the rink?”
“Yeah. Sort of a last supper? Very religious.”
“If you really don’t want to skate, we can just hit the movies, I guess,” I said. Damn. I didn’t remember dating to be so hard the first time through.
“Don’t be silly. It sounds really fun and I’m so pleased you picked out something unique. It’s kind of romantic in a Happy Days sort of way. But if my butt is bruised on Monday, it better be because you were pounding it into the floor, not dropping it on the floor.”
“Um… We’re not really going to do that tonight, are we?”
“You are all flustered. That’s not like you! No. I never screw on a first date. Except that once and I learned my lesson from that.”
“It is our first date, isn’t it? I mean just the two of us. What took us so long?”
“Something about having to share you. And… um… don’t worry about that. This is just the kind of relationship I need right now. I’m kind of exploring different facets of my… um… sexuality. You know? For as little as she is, Beca can pretty much grab an ear and lead me around wherever she wants. But I know I’m not gay. A little bi, maybe. Or a lot. But I still like guys—you—too.”
She kept her jacket on all through our burger at the diner. We split a shake but didn’t try to drink out of the same glass. If we were going to share spit it was going to be first-hand, not second. When we got to the rink there was a short wait to get skates rented and then I offered to take her coat and put it in a locker with mine and our shoes.
Holy shit! I was reconsidering the whole first date thing.
She’d gone back to the simple blue Sailor Moon outfit but I didn’t remember it being quite so… brief on Monday. Instead of the long boots, she had over the knee white socks. The skirt was almost up to her butt ledge and was held up by a pair of suspenders. And this top was cropped shorter than the one she wore to school. A little flip and I’d see her bra. She had the long pigtail hair extensions in with a little topknot on each side of her head.
Like a gentleman, I knelt in front of her to help her into her skates and get them laced up. She kept rocking her knees out and back showing me a pair of classic blue cotton panties. At least she wouldn’t be exposing anything too significant if she did fall spraddled.
“See anything you like, pervert?” she whispered. “You shouldn’t be looking up a girl’s skirt at her panties.”
“Just thankful you are wearing them,” I said.
“I’m not going to show my cootch to every random guy who gets on his knees in front of me,” she said.
I got my skates on and our shoes in the locker then held her hand as we maneuvered to the floor.
Back in the ’50s, V1 was a pretty good skater. Roller skating was one of the half-dozen accepted clean dates you could take a girl on. It was right up there with church events and school events. Grange dances and anything that took place at the Palace Theatre in downtown South Bend, later renovated to become the Morris Civic Auditorium. There were drive-ins, of course, but they were on the ‘not acceptable unless it’s a family outing’ list. So, in the mid-50s my top choice was roller skating.
It was a big temptation to join the hotshot guys in the middle of the rink doing tricks. The outermost part of the rink was for beginners who needed to hang onto a wall or railing. And between the two was where lone skaters and couples circulated. It was perfectly acceptable to hold hands with your date while skating, even if you weren’t ‘serious’ about each other. And if you knew what you were doing, a guy who could skate well could go stag to the rink and skate dance with just about any unattached girl in the rink. That meant, not just holding hands, but wrapping an arm around her for a simple promenade or guiding her in couples’ dances to waltz music, fox trot, and even polkas.
Since I didn’t date that much in high school, getting a lift to the skating rink on Friday or Saturday night was how I got to hold girls in my arms.
V3’s problem, of course, was the opposite of my problem with playing the guitar. In this case, my head knew all the right moves but V2 had never been on skates before. Joan was in no better shape as she had difficulty adjusting to quad skates and a rink rather than inline skates and wide open sidewalks. It took about fifteen minutes before we both got to a point where we felt stable and another fifteen minutes of just holding hands as we skated to feel like we were doing okay. By that time, I needed a break.
“Are you tired?” Joan asked.
“The skates are working different muscles than my walking and jogging exercises,” I said. “We’ll definitely be sore tomorrow.”
“We?”
“Oh, yeah. I hate to say it but even if you aren’t feeling the burn now, you are using your muscles in a way you aren’t used to and that equates to sore muscles in the morning,” I laughed as I got us sodas. We chatted away while we drank and pointed out couples who were trying out interesting things. Then the rink announcer cleared the floor of all skaters and announced a couples-only skate. I took Joan’s hand and led her off the carpet onto the skate surface again. We started a pretty gentle glide, holding hands as a few couples got more into the music. Then I surprised her and shifted so I was skating backwards in front of her and took her other hand.
“Jacob? What are you doing? I can’t skate backwards!”
“Just put your hand on my shoulder and follow along like we were at a dance. This is what skating is all about. I’ll handle moving us. You just glide along.” That was another thing about skating instead of dancing. If your partner didn’t know the steps when you were dancing, she did nothing but stumble along after you. On skates, though, she never had to lift her feet.
And my right hand finally made contact with Joan’s bare waist. I felt her breath deepen and lost myself in the sensation of her skin beneath my fingers and the music in our ears.
Like playing the guitar, all I had to do was disconnect from the activity a little and let the learned patterns of my head lead on the patterns of my feet. I reversed us so Joan was going backward and I pushed her. I reversed again and she followed as I skated backward. After a few of these moves, she started copying my footwork and we were dancing counterclockwise around the rink.
I completely forgot I had a weak leg until we stepped off the skating surface—long after the end of the official couples’ dance—and that leg nearly collapsed under me.
“Shit! I think I overdid it a bit,” I said. “My right leg is shaking.”
“That was so much fun, Jacob! It was almost like flying.”
“You can continue to skate if you want,” I said, “but I’m afraid my leg is through for the night.”
“Um… I don’t think there’s anyone else here I want to have touch me like you did,” she said.
“Let me help you with your skates,” I said. I started to kneel down shakily and she pushed me back into my chair. Then she raised one heavy foot and placed it in my lap so I could unlace her skate. When I pulled it off, I took the opportunity to massage her foot and calf. Joan sighed.
“Maybe we can go someplace where you can keep doing that,” she said as she switched feet and I removed her other skate. “You can massage my legs. And so on.”
“I’d love to massage your so on,” I laughed. It was more work to get my own skates off than it had been to get hers off. My leg was still shaking as we walked to our locker and got our shoes and coats.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at Joan’s car. Her Mazda Miata hardtop was sexy, flashy, and totally impractical. Joan looked good in it, of course. I could imagine her with the hardtop retracted in the summer, driving somewhere with her blonde hair blowing out the top. Alone. I’m not so big I couldn’t fit in the passenger seat, but the center hump extended so far into the foot well that I felt like I was sitting sideways.
We sat in the car a few minutes until the heater had it warmed up inside. At least that worked well. As soon as the car was warmed up, Joan struggled out of her coat and shoved it down around my feet.
“You, too,” she said. I got out of my coat and it joined hers, packing my legs up to my knees. She leaned across the gearshift to kiss me. Making out in this car was definitely not going to be as easy or comfortable as Rachel’s Yaris. It made me reconsider what kind of car I’d want when I got my license. Em’s five-year-old Prius was all practical—hybrid four-door that got forty-five miles per gallon. V1’s mid-life crisis car was a Mustang and I thought fondly of driving it. But it had some of the same problems in the front seat as the Miata—maybe a little roomier but it still had deep bucket seats with a center gearshift. Maybe I’d just get a pickup with a big bench seat in front.
Never underestimate a determined woman. Joan drove us to the school parking lot with my hand caressing her thigh all the way up to her exposed panties. Once parked, the girl managed the impossible and climbed over the console into my lap, her head practically crunched against the roof as we started to kiss. I was into it enough that the cramped quarters didn’t slow me down a bit and I had both hands on her butt as she started working her pussy against my very responsive boner.
She wiggled around some more and managed to get my belt unfastened and my jeans open.
“Push them down. I want to feel you against my pussy,” she said. It was almost an impossible task to do while she continued to hump my pole. Having my jeans open and out of the way sure increased the pleasure for both of us, though, and I shifted my hands up under her sailor-style crop top. In a minute I was cupping her nice boobs through her bra and she was doing all the work at our middle. I slipped around her back looking for the catch on her bra. “Front. The latch is in front.” I switched and found the clever gizmo between her breasts. As soon as I figured out the closure, I had her bare breasts in both my hands. She moaned into my mouth and kept humping.
I pushed the little shirt up so I could sort of see her nipples as I started working myself into a position where I could suck them. Joan pushed back and looked into my eyes from about two inches away. That was all the room we had.
“Jacob, I have really sensitive nipples. I think they might be more sensitive than my clit. If you suck on them, you can fuck me.”
“Joan, I don’t think we should do that.”
“I don’t want to. You just need to know that if you go there, I won’t be able to stop you. I’m depending on you. Can you tongue my nipples without popping up my pussy?”
“I can do that. I just want you to enjoy yourself.” I could barely reach the little nubs with us in this position. Her moans ramped up as soon as I made contact.
“Oh! Oh, yeah. Lick. Suck. Oh, God!” she wasn’t kidding about how sensitive they were. Her hips were in overdrive and I could feel the increasing heat of her pussy rubbing up and down my shaft. I was feeling light headed. It would be so easy to shove the crotch of her panties out of the way and slip up into her. Easy being a relative term. I wondered if that was how the guy who nailed her on their first—and only—date had managed it. Joan was completely out of control. When she stiffened and whined out an orgasm, my trapped cock started spurting, too.
I lifted my head and kissed her, returning one hand to her breast and the other to her butt.
“Jacob, you really did it now. I wish prom was tomorrow. I want to fuck you so bad.”
“We don’t have to do that, Joan.”
“You don’t have to fuck me after the prom,” she said, sounding a little hurt. “I just. It’s like I’ve always imagined that was the whole prom package. I’d be with someone I actually liked and take him to my bedroom. And then we’d do it in a real bed and I’d feel it all like I want to feel it.” I could feel the moisture on her face as tears wet them. “I’ve never done it in a bed. I’ve never even done it with a boy I really like. I… We don’t have to… but…”
“Joan, I won’t put pressure on you but all I could think of while we were humping was how much I wanted to be in you. We’ve got a couple of months yet before prom. Let’s have a couple more dates and see if we still like each other.”
“Thank you, Jacob. Thank you for taking me flying around the roller rink and for staying in control and for the best come I’ve ever had. Thank you for being our boyfriend.”
It was ridiculously difficult to get our clothes mostly in place and get Joan back over to her own seat without kicking the car into gear. I got my coat and handed her hers. We kissed again over the gearshift and Joan drove me home. I really had a hard time getting out of the car. Not that it was hard to get out of but that it was hard to leave Joan. We got a couple more deep kisses with my hand inside her coat and under her shirt. Then I pushed myself out of the car and went into the house.
Shit! What just happened?
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