the time. She seemed to be able to balance better with her eyes closed, and she looked very pretty and helpless. At her cunt there was a knot of small, black curls, and there were hairs like fine threads around her nipples. When she lifted her legs to take off her stockings, her cunt split open like a red, hairy pea-pod. I turned to Ruth for one of the glasses, because I needed a drink badly about then, and Ruth was staring at Jane's cunt. Then she looked at me.
“Change your mind,” she said. “Now that she has her clothes off it would be easy. Why don't you take her?”
Most of the brandy was gone from the glass she gave me, and the one she was drinking from was still almost full. The girl pushed her head through the top of a pink nightgown and jack-knifed under the covers.
“Come on,” I said. I switched off the light and Ruth and I went upstairs to our room.
“If she were a boy she wouldn't be down there alone,” Ruth said. “I wish she were a boy just that old. I'd give him something to make his fuzz grow.”
She killed the drink and set the glass on the floor beside the bed, and then she lay back and stroked her tits and her belly. She kicked the covers down to her knees and teased herself a while before she put her fingers on her cunt. I remembered many times before when she had done that. It was all familiar. I stood by the window and, standing there, I remembered a lot of things.
“I'd like a boy with a pink little prick to jazz me,” she said. “I'd take him down by the woods where we walked today. And when we came back he'd have something to boast to other boys about! But they wouldn't believe him. Do you know what I'd do? I'd treat him as though he were a man who had driven me wild. I'd tear off my clothes and fling myself in front of him, and he'd never know how awkward he was. What would happen to a boy if I did that, Bill? How would he be when he grew up?”
“He'd be scared into being another Toby,” I said. “He'd piss in his pants as soon as you started.”
I had forgotten how many noises there were in the country at night, and I stood listening to them, trying to pick them apart and know what each one was. There were some that I recognized, and there were a great many more that I could not understand. I tried to give each sound an identity: I would pick one out and try to picture the little green frog puffing out his throat to make it, or I would imagine a black cricket creeping in the grass and sawing with his legs. But when I did that the sound was no longer the way it had been. That is one reason why I do not like to go to public concerts, for when I see a perspiring man scraping a violin the music loses something for me. And the pained, intent faces of the audience at the concert make me want to scream. That is why I stay at home and listen to concerts on the radio, but with jazz it is different. It does not matter if the man who plays it is a ridiculous caricature in an unpressed tuxedo, because it is his own music, and when he hears something in his head that is very beautiful and plays it he is much closer to Beethoven than he is to the man who plays Beethoven's music in a concert hall.
I was thinking of these things, and I did not hear Ruth call me until she called me the second time, and then I turned away from the window.
“Don't you want to jazz me either?”
I walked to the bed and put one knee on it and dragged my cock across her face. She pulled me onto the bed, and I saw that she was about as drunk as she ever got. I grabbed her tits and shook them and I felt for her cunt. Even with the light out I could read the letters M-I-N-E on her belly, and her nipples were very dark. Because of the way she was holding my prick I could not see if the end of it was as dark as her nipples.
I heard a nasal voice speak downstairs.
“I forgot to turn off the radio,” I said.
I put on my robe and left Ruth on the bed and went downstairs and turned it off. I stood there in the room, in the dark, and I heard a dog bark someplace. I waited there a long time, and then I walked to Jane's room.
She was asleep. I found the tumbler I had left there on the bureau and I sat down on the chair drinking what was left of it and I watched the girl. My mind wandered back to that moment when I had stood in the doorway of the room upstairs and watched her looking at the pictures of Ruth, and I wished that I had been able to know what was in her head when she said 'oh' the way she had.
I pushed back the covers on the bed and stood over the girl. The nightgown was up to her belly, and she was lying on her back. I dropped the robe off and stood naked, looking at her. My prick stood out like an arm. I looked at myself and at the girl.
I was careful not to touch her when I lay down, and then I lay stiffly there beside her with my cock sticking up, and I did not move or touch her for a long time.
In her sleep the girl stirred and rolled against me, her thigh against mine, her belly against my hip. I touched her arm, and when she did not move again I covered our bodies and faced her. I touched her tits, her legs, and her belly. Bit by bit I felt for her pussy, until I finally rested my fingers on it. I petted the prickling hair and gradually worked my hand between her thighs. Each movement that I made seemed to take hours, and when I gained something I waited a long time before I went further.
The girl moved when my hand touched her cunt, but she did not wake up.
My heart was so noisy that the sound of it filled the room.
My heart pounding.
The girl stirring.
A dog barking somewhere, and the sound of the bed each time that I moved.
I held my prick against her belly. Then I took her wrist with my thumb and finger and I lifted it carefully and put her hand on my balls. Her hand lay on my balls with no more life than a leaf. The blood in my prick seemed to pound on her wrist. Her cunt, twitching suddenly in my fingers, startled me so that I almost cried out.
I lifted her hand again and laid it on my prick. I closed her fingers, but they fell open and would not stay tight around it. Then I held them in my hand and squeezed them.
I moved her hand up and down, and for a moment I felt her fingers closing, but when I stopped moving her hand they fell open again.
I took my hand from between her thighs and slid my prick in where it had been. For a long time we were together that way, my prick just resting against her hot cunt, and our bellies pressed softly together.
When she moved again I slid away from her, and then I got out of the bed. I covered her shoulders, and then I took the glass from the bureau and put it in the kitchen.
Ruth was asleep when I went up to our room. I crawled quietly into bed and worked her very slowly. When she was awake I fucked her.
Chapter IV
Jane was very quiet when we went down to breakfast in the morning.
“How do you feel today?” Ruth asked her.
“All right, I guess,” she said. “I'm sorry if I did something wrong last night, Mrs. March. I never drank anything before except a glass of wine once.”
Ruth said that was all right, but she told her that it wouldn't be a good thing to talk about. I asked her if she remembered going to bed. The last thing she remembered was being on the couch.
“I thought you had to put me to bed,” she said to Ruth. “I felt awful about that.”
“No,” Ruth said. “You went to bed.”
The girl brightened up then. She went to the kitchen for another glass of water and we ate breakfast, and there was milk and there were eggs, just as Ruth had said there would be. So that part of it was what I expected. I drank several glasses of the milk.
“I have an idea bothering me again,” Ruth told me. “I think I'll work today. What are you going to do?”
I didn't have anything to do, so after breakfast I went for a walk. I walked down the road and saw a little green snake and then I walked back to the house. When I walked into the driveway I heard someone in the barn trying to start the car. It was Jane. She had a list of things Ruth wanted from the store.
I got behind the wheel, and after I had worked on it for a while the engine came to life.
“I haven't anything to do,” I said. “I might as well drive you to the store.”
Perhaps I expected that the girl would say something or do something while we were driving those five miles.
