Double Take
Chapter 40
“The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
“HMM. MAYBE I SHOULD GO to prom, too,” my sister said when I told her about what Joan and I were doing and that I needed to figure out a transportation solution. I was hoping she’d volunteer to chauffeur us but never thought about her planning to go to prom, too. Dummy!
“You mean you don’t already have a date and everything set up?” I exclaimed. “I mean… You’re a senior. Isn’t this like the most important event of the year?”
“Um… There’s so much during senior year,” she said. “I had to take that NSO exam in December and see what I’m qualified for. And now there’s SATs in two weeks. Seems silly to be taking it now when I’ll have to take it again in two years when I get out of Service. But they say that good scores on the SAT will help determine whether I’m eligible for a management track in any of my service options. And then there’s graduation coming up two weeks after the test. I guess I just let prom slip by.”
“And none of the guys you’ve been dating have offered to take you?”
“They all have dates for prom already. My first choice for a date already has one.”
“Who?”
“You, dummy. Hmm. There’s this nice but kind of geeky boy I’ve been flirting with, though. I bet he doesn’t have a date yet. I’ll ask him.”
“Oh. Well, good luck.”
“Hey. How about if we double to the prom. I’ll pay for a pre-prom limo to pick us all up and then you can pay for one to take us home. You can drop us off first and have him drive around for a while so you can make out with Joan in the back of the limo. From what I’ve heard, there’s a four hour minimum. That should give you plenty of time. I don’t think Brian has much money, so we’ll keep everything else simple.”
“What will you wear?” I asked. Okay, I was pretty tuned in to the way girls talked. I knew for sure that one of the major areas of discussion at lunch on Monday would be what dress Joan had chosen for prom.
“Oh, probably the same little black dress I wore for the Winter Dance and the Valentine’s Dance. I don’t want to go out and spend a lot if I’m paying for part of the limo.”
“Here,” Dad said, sliding his credit card over to me. “Why don’t you take your sister out and get her a prom dress?” We’d finished our Easter dinner and were just sitting around the dining table chatting. “Try to keep it under $300 please. As pretty as that LBD is, you don’t want to wear it for prom, too.”
“Really, Dad?” Em said excitedly. He nodded.
“Can I go, too?” Pey asked. She was almost as excited as Em. “I mean shopping? I don’t have a date for prom yet.”
“That’s kind of up to Em,” I said. “This is for her.”
“Of course you can go!” Em laughed. “I wouldn’t trust J’s judgment on what dress I should get.”
“You should probably go call this young man and make sure you have a date first.”
Em jumped up from the table and ran to her room to make the call.
Shopping with Em and Pey was a lot of fun. I mean, I got to just sit and play on my iPhone and look up each time a beautiful girl who I loved came out to model another dress. We’d gone to Macy’s and I found the same clerk who helped Joan. She looked at me a little strangely until I explained that this was my sister, not a second date. Em said she wanted a short party dress that she’d be able to wear again to other occasions and the saleslady was all over it.
Em eventually chose a very pretty two-piece outfit with a silver skirt decorated with grey and black roses and a form-fitting black top. When she shifted around and raised her hands as if to dance, she exposed a nice band of soft skin where her date’s hand would rest. I was a little envious. And it only cost a little over a hundred dollars. Well within Dad’s budget.
Brian joined us after our excursion and Em led us to Louie’s for a tux rental. He hemmed a bit but Em told him not to worry. She didn’t want him in anything outrageous—just a simple black tux. He looked pretty good in it with his tousled blonde hair. Even with sneakers.
“J,” Em whispered to me. “Pay for the tux with Dad’s card. Please? We’ll still be under two hundred.” I smiled at her and slipped the cashier the card. I don’t think Brian ever knew that it was paid for.
I was right about the lunchroom conversations on Monday but we all had to buckle down on the project. Beca and I spent a little time each day after school going over the PowerPoint. Rachel had the paper edited and formatted according to Mr. Richards’ stylesheet.
Rachel and I only had one opportunity to get together during the week and it was a little rushed and unsatisfying Thursday afternoon. I really wanted to be with her more and she did, too, but there just wasn’t any time we could be at one of our houses without being interrupted. Em picked up Pey from school Thursday and took her to the mall to pick out earrings so Rachel and I could have a little time in my bedroom.
“Don’t forget me, J. Please?” Rachel said as we lay together after we’d made it to an orgasm. This was becoming my favorite part of making love to her, even though I had to keep one eye on the clock so we were dressed and studying by five o’clock.
“Rachel, you are the girl for me. Do you want me to cool it with Joan? I don’t want to let anything damage what we have,” I said. It was weird enough to be dating—I mean really dating and getting sexual—two girls. Both of them knowing it and encouraging me with the other was more than my V1 head could comprehend. In that timeline, being with two girls meant you were cheating on one or both of them.
“I get a little jealous knowing that you are with Joan on Saturday night, I admit,” she said. “This is kind of the test, though, J. Are we really going to be together? I mean all of us? I think Beca, Desi, and I are mostly upset that we don’t get to buy pretty clothes and go out that night more than we’re jealous of you and Joan. I just love you so much that I want to be there, too.”
“Why don’t the three of you plan something special?” I said. “Here’s an idea. The limo is going to pick us up at six to go out to dinner. Then the prom starts at eight. We have the limo for four hours. Why don’t we send it to pick the three of you up to go to dinner after it’s dropped Em, Brian, Joan, and me off at the prom? Then you can have him take you to one of your houses for a private dance.”
“That’s such a good idea, J. You’d do that for us?”
“You’re my girlfriends and I love you,” I said.
Friday after school, Francie came over. No, we didn’t screw or anything. Em was taking her out for her eighteenth birthday. But she had little William Jay with her and I got to hold the baby for a while before Rachel picked me up for our Friday night date.
“Gosh. I don’t have a present for you, Francie,” I sighed as I handed the baby off to Em. “Maybe I could give you your first ever eighteen-year-old kiss.” I didn’t give her an opportunity to respond. I just pulled her to me and felt her melt as we got our tongues tangled.
“You’ve been waiting for six months to get me back for that, haven’t you?” Francie giggled. “Man. I need to get in shape and get back in the game. I forgot what I was missing!”
Rachel picked me up at six for our date and we did the unheard of. We drove way out in the country and found a place to park. In the back seat of her Yaris, we made love for four hours.
We all got together Saturday afternoon to go over the final paper and presentation, with Beca and me rehearsing the presentation in front of our three girlfriends. We were finally satisfied with all the pieces. We printed the paper on Joan’s printer after we’d made a few edits and locked up the presentation. We were as ready as we’d ever be. We’d turn in the project Monday morning and Mr. Richards told us that the order in which projects arrived on his desk would be the order of presentations. Most people in the class would wait until the last minute to turn them in, so it was likely that Beca and I would be the first to present on Wednesday. We didn’t mind. We were ready and decided to practice a couple more times before the presentation.
Joan and I were a little less frantic about getting things ready for prom. Our date was laid back and I found out more about her. Her parents had been divorced for five years and her mother had been well provided for. Her parents met in college and married. But they signed a prenuptial agreement. It clearly stated that her mother would work to put her father through school and that she would be entitled to half of whatever he earned and they acquired. Indiana not being a community property state, the agreement settled the terms of what could have been a messy divorce. It fixed the terms of property division, continued support, and child support. When her father became president of a large financial conglomerate in Chicago, her mother declined to move with him. Joan was twelve. The terms of the settlement had provided the existing level of support for Sharon for the same number of years they had been married, so she was set for twenty years from the date of their divorce. Joan would continue to get direct support until she was twenty-one and a trust fund that would mature and be fully in her control when she turned twenty-five.
“Do you miss your father?” I asked as I held her hand across the restaurant table.
“Yeah. Sometimes. I go to Chicago for the summer. It’s fun. My stepmom is a little resentful, but we called a truce when Dad threatened to throw us both out. I’ll take some classes at the College of Graphic Arts this summer. And in Chicago, I don’t have to compete with my mother.”
“Is she really that much of a cougar?”
“Yeah. But it didn’t affect me until I started dating. Then it was like she wanted to impress my dates, even if they only rolled by to pick me up. She said it would help my cause if the guys I dated saw that I have the genes for a long-term body and would look as good in twenty years as I do now,” Joan said sadly. “There, now you know what you have to look forward to.”
“Twenty years?” I laughed. “We haven’t even learned to foxtrot yet!” I paid our dinner tab and we headed to the club for our lesson.
“Jacob? Are you going to fuck me?”
“Is that what you want, Joan?” I was between her legs in the back seat of the Audi and started pulling her panties down over her butt. I hadn’t touched her aching breasts and she was obviously confused but I wanted to see if her breasts were all that turned her on.
“Yes. But not yet. Please?”
“Then don’t worry, love. I’ll keep my pants on.”
“But then, why… You’re… Oh, my God! Are you going to eat me?”
“I tasted you off my fingers last week and liked it. I want to taste you right from the source.”
“Oh, Jacob… That’s… Nobody has ever… Really?”
I licked up the inside of her thigh and across the crease between her outer labia and the hollow of her thigh. Then the other side. Joan was quiet, occasionally catching her breath as she waited to see what I would do next or where I would lick next. Unlike Rachel, Joan was shaved smooth with a landing strip just above her slit. We’d kissed a bit before I moved down on her but she wasn’t really open or wet yet. I took my time, just kissing and licking her, watching her outer lips get slick with my saliva and eventually yield to my probing tongue. Once that outer seal was broken, it seemed the inner juices began to flow. And Joan became more vocal. I tugged at her inner labia with my lips and ran my tongue up her slit, collecting her juice and smearing it around her clit. Once I’d hit the button, Joan started rocking her hips back and forth, fucking my face. It was a long slow build but when I slid two fingers up inside her and began bouncing against her spot, she went wild. I couldn’t really make sense of anything she was saying because her thighs kept clamping closed over my ears as she rolled her hips forward and braced her feet against the roof of the car, opening herself fully to me and praying to Jesus based on the few words I could make out. She hadn’t come yet, but I sensed it was going to be big when it hit. I used my other hand to run my thumb through her juices and as I began seriously lashing her clit with my tongue, I pressed my thumb against her asshole. That did it. Joan exploded. Her pelvic muscles were all competing to see which would spasm the hardest. Her butt went into overdrive and sucked my thumb inside as she screamed. There was so much juice pooled under her that I was concerned about stains on the leather seat.
I cleaned up what I could from her with my tongue, careful not to irritate her overexcited genitals. I managed to get her panties over her feet and slid them up her silky legs. When they reached her butt, she shifted and pulled them up. Then I rose up and took her in my arms to kiss. She still hadn’t said anything. Tasting herself on my mouth, she licked around it, and cleaned her juices from me. Finally, she just hugged me tight with her face against my chest.
“I liked that,” she whispered. I’d begun to worry that she wasn’t going to speak to me. “I liked it a lot. It was so different. My nipples are so sensitive that by the time I even reach my pussy to masturbate I’m ready to climax. You built a whole different kind of tension in me. It built more slowly and at first, I thought nothing was going to happen at all. Then it was like my pussy caught fire or something. And not just my vagina. Everything. I could feel it in my toes. Thank you.”
“You are welcome, beautiful. You can only imagine how serious I am when I say it was my pleasure. I would be happy to go down on you at any time.”
“I wonder if you could come to Chicago to visit me this summer.”
“I’m sure my parents would choke on that idea. But we’ll see. Speaking of whom, we’d better get home. I don’t want my Saturday night privileges curtailed.”
“But I didn’t get you off.”
“I’ll survive. Better believe I’ll be thinking of your sweet pussy when I jerk it tonight, though.”
I poised above her, hesitating before I penetrated her secret depths. Her orbs glistened with my saliva and her nipples stretched upward in the half-g acceleration. Her eyes never left mine—seeking, imploring—as she gently tugged me forward. I penetrated into that liquid fire between her legs, only the head of my cock in her channel when it hit the obstruction that declared her virginity.
“Now,” she whispered and I thrust forward, tearing the membrane and causing her to gasp as I sank fully into her depths. I held still, giving her time to adjust to the massive girth of my invader. At her urging, we began to move again. “Faster. Harder. Uhnghh! Yes!”
The intensity of her orgasm triggered my eruption deep in her womb.
And then I knew. The mystery of our secondary rankings. I was Poet31. I would write of this night in verse that I would take with us to the stars with Research17 as my partner.
THE END
Our Human Geography project was turned in and now I handed in my short story to Ms. Levy. It probably wasn’t as short as she wanted. I just couldn’t get all the things I thought were needed into the story in fewer words. It was sixty pages long. Well, we’d discussed the difference between a novel and a novella when we read Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Generally, a novella was 20-40,000 words and a novel was more than that. Fahrenheit 451 was just the high side of the break. My story was just under 20k. I was pretty proud of it and had been hard the entire time I was writing the last two pages.
After school on Tuesday, we all went to Joan’s house to practice the presentation, like five more times until we finally had it down to the fifteen-minute time limit Mr. Richards had set. We had to talk over part of the animation in order to make the final point, but we could do it. And Mr. Richards had also negotiated with Joan’s, Desi’s, and Rachel’s teachers so they could attend the presentation and then go to their regular classes. I thought that was especially cool of him to acknowledge them.
Fifteen minutes Wednesday morning and it was over. The class applauded politely. We introduced our team and what each had done. Mr. Richards dismissed them to get to their classes and the next student presentation began. It was boring as hell and I wondered if that was how ours had come off. It was also only a ten-minute presentation, so the next project on the list was presented. It would take five or six class periods to get through all the presentations and then we’d have about five days left to review for the AP exam. It was kind of a letdown.
We were all a little quiet at the lunch table, feeling the absence of our main topic of conversation for the past several weeks. Rachel sat on my left and Desi leaned against me on the right. Across from us, Joan and Beca were whispering together and both were blushing.
“You guys suck,” a guy said beside our table. I looked up to see Kent, one of our classmates in Human Geography. I’d thought he was a pretty decent guy and he seemed almost as protective of his partner, Brittany, as I was of Beca. I think Brittany might have been the youngest in our class. She was just fourteen and really smart. She tagged along behind Kent but didn’t seem very happy about it today. “How are any of the rest of us supposed to match a presentation like yours? We’ll all be lucky if we even get AP credit now. Fuck you very much.”
“Hey, Kent,” I said. “Richards said all the projects would be judged on their own merits and not against each other. I’m sure you guys will do fine.” I really didn’t want to get into a hassle in the lunchroom and I could see Beca straightening up for a fight. “You’re first tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. For all the good it will do us. We thought getting our project in on Monday would put us first to present but you guys and those idiots today got your papers in before us because we had to reprint a section of our presentation. It just sucks feeling like we don’t stand a chance of acing it after your presentation today.” His attitude dropped a notch but he was still pretty bitter and Brittany hadn’t said anything.
“Have you practiced?” Beca demanded.
“Well, sure. You know. We go over the notes and what we’re going to say,” Kent said.
“Why don’t you give the presentation to us for practice?” Beca said.
“What? Like now?”
“How about after school. Come over to my house and we’ll set it up the same as we did for Beca and Jacob. We made them practice the whole thing five times last night.”
“Jesus. No wonder you were so smooth.”
“What do you say? Brittany?”
“I’ll have to call my mom and ask her. It sounds like a good idea.”
“Why are you guys willing to help us?” Kent asked.
“We didn’t do our project to be better than yours,” Beca said. “We did it to be the best we could be. Why wouldn’t we help you be the best you can be?”
Actually, Brittany and Kent had a pretty good project. They didn’t use real animation, but they had various map overlays that showed how the geography determined the kinds of food typical of the area. It was easy to see things like fish on the coast and grain in the Midwest, but they also showed the shapes of farms and how the Homestead Act of 1862 influenced the kinds of crops that would be grown. They got a solid round of applause for their presentation and Thursday found us with two more people at our table.
Having missed our planned celebration together on Wednesday after school, Rachel and I rushed to her house on Thursday and made love. We were so intent on each other that we were still going when we heard her brother, Richard, come in the house after his school let out. I’m not sure how we managed to get dressed and look like we were studying when he found us.
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