“Yeah.”
“Everything is easier than you think it will be.”
“Do we have to go back that way?”
Maurey laughed as if I was a funny fellow.
Her spot was a pool circled by clover up against a hill. On the hillside, willows grew right up to the bank. Tiny purple flowers made a carpet from the creek to the pool.
Maurey stepped out of her tennis shoes and peeled off her shirt. She was wearing a bra. “Strip time, Sammy.”
I wanted to see her body naked, but, lack of snow or not, it wasn’t skinny-dip weather. “Are we going to swim?”
“Feel the water.” She sat on a clump of grass and leaned back to pull off her jeans. Without her clothes on, anyone could tell Maurey’s belly wasn’t just fat.
I knelt to run my fingertips over the water. “Jeeze Louise.”
Maurey’s arms were behind herself, undoing the bra. “Don’t they have hot springs where you come from?”
“I don’t think so.” I stuck my hand all the way in. Little bubbles rose off the bottom of the pool, filtering up through green fronds, slowly popping on the surface. Small yellow fish darted among the fronds.
Maurey waded into the pool, bent forward so her hands and wrists got wet as her knees did. “I turned goldfish loose in here when I was seven. Can you believe they live all winter?”
What I wanted to know, besides how hot water could come out of the ground, was what this group nudity would lead to. Probably nothing, there’d been no indication of anything more than buddies-having-a-baby in months. But I would never stop hoping.
By the time I undressed and waded in, Maurey had settled back with her head on a rock and the rest of her body stretched out under the semi-see-through surface. The water was way warm, almost as hot as I like a bath. Maurey’s face had a light smile. She was looking at my thing which had shrunk up about the size of a boiled Vienna sausage. I sat down quick so she wouldn’t laugh at it.
“Has Chuckette touched your peanut yet?” Maurey asked.
Peanut? “Chuckette doesn’t even know men have peanuts. She thinks my fingers can make her pregnant. Have you touched Dothan’s?”
Maurey ignored that one. Her hair flowed up by her ears. I touched her foot with mine and she didn’t pull back. “I kind of enjoy being pregnant,” she said, “once you quit being sick. It’s so weird. You men will never know how it feels.”
“I bet it’s like a football in your tummy.”
“More like a rotating watermelon.”
I slid around until I was right across from her and the soles of both our feet pushed against each other. The bubbles made a neat tickle feeling coming up my back and legs, like farting in the bathtub only without the embarrassment. Lydia and Hank took baths together, which I thought was weird, but this wasn’t weird at all.
Maurey leaned back to look at the sky. “I’m floating in hot water and there’s hot water in me with a baby floating in it. We’re all the same temperature, water and people.”
This was the first I’d heard about the baby floating. “What does the baby breathe if you’re full of hot water?”
Her look was nothing but disdain. “Sam, how can you expect to be a father when you don’t know squat about babies?”
Below me, the bottom felt like wet vinyl. I dipped all the way under to think about her question. No matter how young or old a guy is, he doesn’t know about babies until someone tells him. Knowing what babies breathed in the womb isn’t a stage of development like walking or pubic hair. I needed to be told.
“When I need to think, this is where I come,” Maurey said. “Even Dad doesn’t know about this spot. Now, if you need to think, you can come here.”
I tried to think of an occasion when I might need to think. “Thanks.”
“Isn’t being friends better than being girlfriends and boyfriends? If you were my boyfriend, I’d never show you this spot because we might break up and then where would I be. Someone I don’t like would know my secret.”
“So if you like someone in the right way and then you stop liking them in the right way, you have to stop liking them at all?”
“Right.”
“I wouldn’t want that.”
She nodded. “See. I told you it’s better to be your friend than it is to like you in the right way.”
“But I still want to fuck with you.”
“I can’t fuck with someone I don’t like in the right way.”
I settled into the hot water up to my ears. To keep her, I couldn’t make love to her, even though I already had, and if I made love to her we wouldn’t be friends anymore. So Dothan got her body and I got the confidences and the secret spot. What a gyp.
The primary question was: Do all girls think like this? If so, every guy would need two.
“Want to see something neat?” Maurey sat up so only below her navel was under water. She held her left nipple with her thumb and index finger and squeezed. “I discovered this yesterday.”
“What is it?”
“Look, silly.”
I leaned forward to stare at her nipple. A little watery white drip appeared from nowhere. “What is it?”
“Milk. I can make milk from my tit.”
“Jesus.”
She squeezed until another drop appeared. There wasn’t a slit like on the end of a penis. The milk just oozed through the nipple. Maurey touched the drop with her finger, then touched her finger to her tongue—like Lydia had done with my first squirt. “It’s warm.”
“Can I taste it?”
She looked at me suspiciously. “It won’t be foreplay.”
“I know, I just want a taste.”
Maurey squeezed her other nipple until a drop of milk appeared. “Okay, but only because it’s so neat.”
I got to my knees and crossed over next to her. She held her hand under her breast to lift it. I leaned over and licked the warm drop off the tip of her nipple. It didn’t taste like milk at all, more like warm dishwater.
“You think if I sucked on it, I’d get more than one drop.”
She lowered her breast back to the normal position. “The milk is for the baby, Sam. Tasting one drop is neat. Drinking me would be too strange.”
“How do you know what’s strange?”
Back at the TM, we fooled around with Frostbite and waited for Maurey’s hair to dry.
Maurey’s hands moved, touching her ears and nose. Her eyebrows rode higher than usual. “I think I’ll talk to Dad before I bike back in. You go on without me.”
I was kneeling when she said this, searching for the perfect blade of grass to whistle through. I looked up at her face and a tiny chill ran up my spine. Life, once again, was fixing to turn over.
“Any chance you might skip the part on who the father is?”
Maurey smiled right at me. “Let’s just say you and Lydia might want to lock your door tonight.”
The best thing about riding a bike from the mountains to a town is, except for a few foothills, the trip is almost all downhill. Maurey’s red Western Flyer had three speeds, so hills didn’t affect her that much, but I’d been in a grunt most of the way coming out. It’s a lot easier to consider alternatives when you’re coasting than grunting.
Here’s how the alternatives lined up: The best, Buddy would make her marry me. The worst, Buddy would sink to violence—castration, death, or, as Dot predicted, he’d brand my butt.
The big problem was that Western culture was as foreign to me as Afghanistan. I mean, how much violence
