One on one, p.13
ONE ON ONE, page 13
part #4 of Nodd's Ridge Series
The flashlight evades him. Surely, he despairs, he’s felt up every inch of this disgusting floor by now. Then his fingertips encounter cool smooth metal and he snatches up the flashlight. Depressing the nipple of the on-off button does zip—which means the bulb is either broken or out of contact with the batteries. Carefully, he tightens the lens to force the contact and suddenly—light. It shows Sam the door—disappointingly ordinary, shabby, filthy, knobless and unlocked, and wonderfully, it creaks open at his touch. He steps through it and into the great empty space they first entered.
From the darkness overhead there is a giggle and a flicker like a cinder.
He swings his light upward and spots her on high, balanced on a beam, a spliff in her fingers. Smoke dances in the light around her.
“Get your idiot ass down here,” he yells. “I’m leaving.”
“Suit yourself. If you weren’t such a tight-ass, you could find your way up here and have a toke with me. It’s good shit.”
She shifts, puts one foot in front of the other like a high-wire walker. Sam stops breathing as she wobbles and then steadies herself. He’s too scared to yell at her.
She waggles the doobie at him in invitation and laughs.
Sam’s light feverishly sweeps the walls and beams for her way up. Shadow pleats the plaster-scabbed brick so he can’t read what’s solid and what might be a doorway or a stairwell. His breath stands in the chilly air like her dope smoke. Frozen sighs, he thinks, I read that somewhere. Stumbling upon an intersection of the written word and reality is still a frisson strong enough to distract him, like a cobweb on his face, from what is happening. Then all he can smell is her dope and his fear.
She hums tonelessly above him, breaking into an occasional hoarse laugh.
He works backward from her to either end of the beam and finds it, the thick rope that is nearly invisible in the shadows. The light cannot find the upper end at all. Loping to it, he gives a tug and it holds. It took her weight, he tells himself. Securing the flash in his jacket, he yanks harder and still it holds. Hand over hand he goes up, tentatively at first until he trusts the rope and then with a powerful quickness.
Watching, she shrieks with witchy laughter and urges him on. Halfway up, something plummets in his peripheral vision and he freezes. Not her, falling—something lighter that lands with a little thump. Something else flutters by. If it’s a bat they’ve somehow disturbed, it’s too woozy to fly for shit. He wants to use his light to make sure she’s okay but he needs both hands to stay on the rope.
“Deanie!” he shouts.
She snickers. Her light clicks on and he sees her standing on the beam. She’s holding the flash in one hand like it was Lady Liberty’s torch and she’s taken off her coat and shirts. It was clothing that fell past him.
“Shit,” he mutters, closing his eyes.
He sees her still, her partial nudity as blinding as a burst of light in his eyes, the afterimage painful on his retinas. The rope creaks with his weight as he hangs there. It hurts his hands. He has to go up or down; he can’t stay where he is.
“Deanie, what’d you do that for?”
She doesn’t answer.
He opens his eyes and she’s crouched on the beam, eyes shut tight, toking deep, oblivious to the fact she’s balancing on a shit-greasy beam thirty feet above the ground. With her gypsy headrag, her rings and chains, her bare torso is somehow natural. She looks as if she might have flown up there, maybe on the back of some fallen angel, for some demonic purpose—lay the devil’s eggs up there maybe.
“If I go back down, will you come down on your own?”
She shakes her head. “You come up, take a hit of this shit, then I’ll come down. Go first, if you want.”
“Why don’t I just go call the cops and let them bring you down?”
She giggles. “Oh Samgod, you don’t want to do that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She comes to her feet and then to her toes. “Guess.” She raises her arms and the trail of her flashlight beam is like a strobe, showing him briefly the lift of her breasts, the tufts in her armpits. “I wish I could fly.”
Sam moves then, climbing the rope as if he were being timed by a nasty drill sergeant. He passes the beam and then lets himself down onto it. As soon as he steps on it, the Mutant retreats a few paces.
“Don’t move,” he says. “Please.”
The beam seems solid but he stands still a moment, waiting for the sound of cracking. Below him it’s totally dark. Taking out his flashlight, he turns it an oblique angle to her so as not to suddenly blind her. Or see her bare breasts too directly. It’s just as disturbing when the light finds her from the side. He doesn’t point it downward. He doesn’t want to see how far up he is.
“I’m not chasing you. Come to me.”
She saunters toward him, holding her arms out a little from her sides. Her nipples are rigid little bumps. Hastily he raises his eyes to her face. His cock is thickening—as much a weird reaction to the adrenaline rush of his terror of heights as it is from the sight of her trembling little peaks. Her eyes are as dark and depthless as the void below them. Just beyond his reach, she stops and takes a long hit from the roach. The tang of the smoke makes his nose itch and he is afraid he’s going to sneeze.
“Hurry up,” Sam urges her, “it’s frigging cold and I’m scared shitless up here. Gimme the goddamn roach and let’s get off this goddamn thing.”
“Don’t grab me,” she warns.
He nods. He has no intention of unbalancing them with stupid heroics.
“Put your arm around me,” she instructs, “slow.”
He encircles her waist so they are side by side, hip to hip.
She raises the roach to his lips. “Come on, now, it’ll feel good.”
For a fraction of a second, the damp paper touches his lip and then he spits it off forcefully. It disappears into darkness. Crying out, she leans after it but he has her firmly by the waist. They sway on the beam. She clings to him tightly in terror and he holds on for them both. After the echo of her cry, he hears his own violent heartbeat in the silence. Her face crushed against his ribs, she hears it too. She sniggers.
It takes him a couple of tries to be able to speak. “Come on, you’re scared too.”
She moves his hand up to her breast. “Wanna check?”
He snatches his hand away. “Cut it out.”
She slides by him to the rope, giggling at the feel of his hard-on against her hipbone. He listens to every inch of her descent. When her high-tops thump the floor, he closes his eyes in relief. Then he takes his guts in his hands and starts down after her.
10
Every creak of the rope is discrete in his ears, as he strains for the sound of strands snapping. By the time he drops off it onto solid ground, he is praying under his breath—automatically, without conviction, just begging any god that might be out there to keep his ass from falling and dying.
The Mutant has found her shirts and is pulling them on. In the backwash of adrenaline, he’s almost grateful for the distraction of another glimpse of her tits. It’s all so perfectly Mutantly weird—go into the Mill with her and risk death. But you do get to see her actual bare tits. When she sees he’s sneaking a peek, she laughs at him. He finds her coat, throws it at her.
“Ooooh,” she teases. “Somebody’s cross.”
Outside, while she closes the clasp on the padlock, Sam stumbles away into some brambles.
“Where you going?”
“Take a leak.”
He’s got to piss so bad he can’t get it started, he’s numb, and then it hurts when it does. It takes forever, while he pisses like he was getting rid of a couple day’s backup.
“It’s so frigging cold,” he mutters to himself, “frigging cold,” but the mantra doesn’t make him less so. It’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t wind up with a cold in his bladder.
Crashing out of the brush, he finds her huddled by the door, humming again. He wonders if she’s so stoned, she’d sit there all night waiting for him and never notice she had frozen to death. He hustles her toward the truck.
She jerks away from him and skips ahead, calling back, “Still mad at me, ‘god?”
He’s too cold and ripped at her to answer.
Dancing away toward the Playground instead of the truck, she grabs the ropes of the swing and jumps up onto its seat.
“Fuck it, Deanie!” he shouts at her, “it’s too frigging cold for this shit! I’ve had enough of your crap! You want a ride home, get in the truck right now or I’m leaving without you and you can get your own ass home!”
She stands on the seat, her arms looped around the ropes, swaying and twisting dreamily. Hands shoved into his Levis, he stamps his feet on the gravel to get his blood going. She drops out of the swing onto her feet and shucks her coat.
“Shit!” He breaks into a lope.
She pulls her double layer of T-shirts over her head as if they were one piece. Sam grabs them from midair, snatches up her coat and wraps one arm around her. She is too consumed with the giggles to resist. When they reach the truck and he has to let go of her to unlock it, he shoves the clothing into her arms.
“Put your goddamn shirt on before you catch pneumonia,” he pleads.
She lets go of the clothes and they fall to her feet. Sam fumbles the coat from the ground and flings it into the truck. He tries to yank the two shirts, still together one over the other, over her head. She goes ragdoll slack so he is forced to hold her up with one arm while he struggles to get the doubled neck of the shirts to pass over her headrag. Then she jerks away from him. He tightens his grip on her and she struggles and he can’t do it, his hands are full of writhing half-naked woman and it feels too much like something bad. The hell with the shirts. Picking her up in a fireman’s carry, he heaves her into the cab.
She slides right back out and he catches her halfway and tries to shove her back and she’s sliding down the front of him, bare tits in his face and then his hands. Her legs wrap around his waist and he can feel the hard ledge of her pubic bone, the softness of her sex against his navel. She grabs his face and wipes her mouth over his frantically until he jerks his head back. The coldness of her skin and the chains across her cheek startle him, raising goosebumps all over him. The shiver knots his scrotum, becomes a jolt to the root of his cock. He tears her off him and bundles her back into the cab. Scooping the T-shirts from the ground again, he tosses them into the cab and scrambles, breathless and trembling, behind the wheel.
He slams his door and shoves the key into the ignition. In a cold sweat of sexual excitement that’s all mixed up with being furious at her, he refuses to look at her. Still he’s intensely aware of her, crouching against the opposite door with her hands between her knees, bare breasts shivering with spasms of giggles. Suddenly she jerks down on the door handle. He lunges after her, grabbing her by the hips as she twists toward the opening door. She manages to flip the shirts through the crack before he yanks the door closed and punches the lock button.
He’s on top of her and her left hand is on his cock. He reaches to shove it away but when his hand covers hers, he can’t, he finds himself pressing both their hands against him and he moves instinctively against the pressure. Now it is Sam who seeks her willing mouth. She tastes of marijuana smoke and cocoa and jelly donut underneath and her tongue is a slippery urgent muscle. Her chains are part of her skin, a cold silky scar, a mysterious new mechanical organ, rolling over his cheek and mouth. The metallic taste makes him moan, is absorbed by his brain and rushes through his nervous system like a drug to turn his penis iron. The chains at her waist and crotch are hard against his leg, his stomach, his penis. The hand that isn’t on the ridge of his cock presses at the small of his back and strokes down over his ass, urging him against her. He lifts himself into a crouch over her, abandoning her mouth for her breasts. Grinding against his leg, she finds his hand and tugs it to her pubis. He nuzzles her armpits, smelling her, tasting her. As his tongue explores the tuft in her armpit, his fingers rub the crotch chain into the warm soft notch between her legs. He pushes the chain to one side and his fingertips slip over the silky threads of her pubic hair, palpable through the frayed denim and her tights. Thumb stroking down, hand closing, knuckles rolling over the yielding heat of her sex, encountering the hard curves of the links of the chain. Her thighs tremble and she clenches them to trap his hand. She unhooks something at her waist and the rig between her legs lets go and falls away. Her fingers are at his fly buttons, then grope below to cup his scrotum and back up to squeeze his hard-on. As he fumbles at her buttons, one flies free and rattles against the dash. Suddenly the vent exhales and a rush of heat washes over their struggling bodies.
Even as he tugs at her buttons, he covers her hand on his crotch to stop her. “No,” he gasps. “Deanie, no. I don’t have a—any,” and she shushes him. “It’s all right. I’m on the Pill.”
Though his hand relaxes, letting her continue to unbutton him, he falters. Her hand is inside his shorts, and he closes his eyes at her direct touch, her fingertips on the head on his cock. She hovers over him, her face in his. When she gives him her mouth, he drives his tongue into it. Her Levi’s are undone, and he drags at them, at the tights underneath, and she’s so close, heat under his fingers, the yielding heat.
A burble of colored light sweeps over the truck from behind and the burp of the police cruiser’s siren makes a mocking raspberry.
The beam of Lonnie Woods’s flashlight catches Sam with his fingers working frantically at his own fly buttons, and the Mutant against the far door. Slow to grasp what is happening, she is still bare-tit, her Levis and tights halfway down her hips and the edge of her pubic hair exposed. Sam flops his jacket over her. She giggles. An idiot can tell she’s wrecked.
“Hi, Sam,” Rick’s father says. “Saw your truck down here, thought it might be stuck or dead or something. You want to shut off the engine? Deanie, honey, where’s your top?”
She can do nothing but snicker.
“On the ground on the other side of the truck,” Sam answers for her.
The policeman gestures with his light. Sam opens the door and gets out to retrieve the shirts. Sergeant Woods coaxes the Mutant from the far door; surprisingly, she cooperates. While she sits on the edge of the seat, Sam tugs her tights and Levis up around her waist, puts her arms into her shirts and pulls them over her head.
Lonnie looks Sam over casually. “Been drinking too, Sam, or just smoking?”
“I wasn’t smoking. She was.”
“No kidding. You got any more dope in the truck?”
Sam shakes his head. “Maybe there’s some in her gear.”
“Deanie, you got any more dope?” Woods asks her.
“Ooops,” she snickers. “Sorry, have to get your own.”
The cop laughs. “You want me to trust you about that, honey?”
She smiles. “Check my stuff. There’s no more shit.”
While the cop is tossing her gear, Sam presses his crotch and winces and then looks up to realize Woods has seen him do it. Woods grins wolfishly. Sam looks quickly away. It takes only a moment more for the cop to toss Sam’s gear too and have them empty their pockets.
“Okay,” he finally sighs. “It’s goddamn cold for this shit, kids. What I want you to do, Sam, is take this girl and then yourself straight home—no stopping to finish what you started either. This is gonna stay between me and you. You better not let me catch you down here again. It’s a public park, not a motel.”
Sam chokes out a thank you.
The policeman studies him a moment as if he were considering saying something else. Then the two of them bundle the Mutant back into the truck and Woods closes the door and leads Sam a few steps away.
“Sam, I’m surprised at you. You can find yourself better company to keep. I’m sure you weren’t thinking about anything but getting laid. But that girl’s legally intoxicated and I don’t need a test to know it and neither do you. It don’t matter she’s easy and willing, if she’s impaired enough, she can’t give consent, legally. Maybe it’s not likely this one would ever claim it was rape but she’s not going to be the last girl you’re ever around who’s impaired. You could find yourself with a lot more serious worries than keeping your eligibility to play basketball. Don’t get yourself in this situation again, son. It’s not worth it.”
Sam can’t meet his eyes. “Yessir,” he mutters.
“Go on, now.”
The cop walks away as Sam restarts the truck.
“Whooo,” breathes the Mutant. “Thank you, ‘god, for making me lose that roach. Any amount’s enough to get me booted off the team.” And she laughs and claps her hands.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny.”
He swings the truck around and climbs the access road to Mill Street.
The Mutant finishes rigging up her chains again and slides across the seat to drop a hand onto his thigh.
He lifts it off. All he can think of is he’s never gonna let the druggie bitch into his truck again. “Don’t touch me again.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a handjob, make you feel better.”
“Get away from me, just go back on the other side.” His voice rises with fury. “I never wanted to do it in the first place, I didn’t want to, Deanie, so get away from me! Get the fuck away from me!”
Only then does he realize he’s frightened her again. Cowering on the floor of the cab with her coat yanked high over up the back of her head to protect herself, ribbons of streetlight spilling over her huddled form, she’s like a porcupine on a back-road stretch of midnight. Abruptly, Sam’s eyes brim and his throat locks. He reaches down and tentatively touches the crown of her head. The brocade under his fingertips is both silky and pebbly. She shrinks away from his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry.”
Depot Street is a very short distance. He stops at the corner as she has always insisted. Putting the gear into park, he gets out and helps her out. She holds herself away from him. Behind them, the police cruiser idles.
