“I know. I'm acting like a child. Let's not fight about it. I don't feel like fighting about anything.”
“I didn't expect punishment from you.”
“I have the clap,” I said.
“If it were really that…” Ruth said. She came to the bed where I was sitting and sat down alongside me. She put her hand on my thigh and sat there with her legs crossed at the ankles and looked at me. “Let's not be silly, Bill. I want you to fuck me.”
Her legs were flattened and spread at the thighs, and the whole side of her body felt warm even through the robe I had on. I looked at her belly and the spreading hair that ran to a sharp V between her legs. A few scattering black hairs were on the inner sides of her thighs, and you could find them almost halfway to her knees. My guts burned, I wanted so much to screw her, and I couldn't kid even myself about that. I remembered Toby, the pansy, and I wondered what it had been like with them; if he had fucked her if he had even tried to fuck her, or what had happened. When I thought of that and thought of all she had been wasting on that crummy fake, I wanted more than before to fuck her myself. It might have been because he was a pansy, and it might have been because he was a fake; whichever it was, when she went off with him it had left me feeling the way you feel when music you like is stopped right in the middle. If something isn't done about it you don't feel right for a long time.
Ruth was moving her hand up and down on my leg, spreading her fingers and closing them on the muscles. I was getting a hard on, and she could see it, but she didn't try to put her hands either on my prick or under my robe. And after a minute she stopped touching my leg and lay back on the bed with her own legs apart just a little and her hands held up by her shoulders with the palms up. I sat and looked at her. I looked at her teats falling, each one, to the side and outward, and I looked at her armpits that she never shaved, and I looked up between her legs, at her cunt. I stood up and I took off the robe.
My prick wasn't hard yet. It stood out in front of me looking angry and big, but it still had a long way to go. Ruth looked at it and at me, and she put one hand out for it. I climbed across the bed, and when I got close enough her hand touched it. I sat leaning on one hand and Ruth just touched my prick. We both watched her hand moving over it and under it, and while we watched it lifted up until it was erect.
It had been a long time ago when I had taken Ruth to that room and given her the first jazzing she'd had, and a lot of things had happened since then. She had learned almost everything there is to know, and since she had been with Toby I supposed that she had learned even more than that. For a while, when I had first known her, she had fucked for Art's sweet sake, or something like that, but it hadn't taken her long to find that you can fuck just for what is in it, and she was better after that. Everybody I knew who had ever fucked her said that she was a hot lay, and what was better, an easy lay, so I decided at last that she was just a natural, and I didn't have to listen to her quoting Eliot so much after that when I was trying to get her legs apart. And even if she let every man she knew jazz her once in a while there was something that made it pretty good to be together, and when we finally got that straightened out everything had been all right with us until this affair of Toby.
I watched Ruth's face now while she played around my cock. From the way she was looking at it I knew that it would be in her mouth in a minute. The first time I had jazzed her she wouldn't suck my prick, and it had taken me several days to get her to do more than just hold it in her mouth while I shoved it back and forth. Then, when she did start to suck it the first time, she had been so worried that I might shoot it in her mouth that it wasn't as much fun as it should have been. But I was careful about that, and once she decided that she liked it there wasn't any stopping point. Then one night she had come home with her change purse full of half dollars and the knees of her stockings dirty. She didn't have any reason for it but boredom, but she had gone along the streets like a whore and propositioned every man she came across, if she liked one it was easy for her to get them to walk down an alley with her. She had even gotten a big Irish cop she came across, too, and that was the part of the story that seemed most amazing to me, because he didn't threaten to run her in if she didn't give it to him for nothing, but paid his fifty cents just like everybody else. The way she told it it was very funny, and when she told it you could really almost see the cop standing with the front of his uniform trousers unbuttoned and Ruth on her knees in the dirt of the alley, leaning against his legs with her mouth closed over the end of his cock, and I always thought that someday I would put that into a story, if I could ever find the right story for it.
The end of my prick was oozing, like clear, white blood spilling from a cut. Ruth had the stuff on her hands, and she was rubbing it onto my prick and onto my balls and then onto her own belly. Every time that she squeezed my prick some more of it spilled out, and there was always some left. She rolled close to me and put her face down on my thigh, and then when she squeezed my prick the stuff dripped down her face. It ran along her cheek, and she turned her head to make it run to the corner of her mouth. Her tongue shot out after it.
“I'm awfully glad you're normal, Bill,” she said. “I never thought of that when I was with you, but being with Toby scared me.”
“A little home in the country,” I said. “Maybe we could raise chickens and have a patch of radishes.”
“I want you to know about something, Bill. He couldn't fuck me, and he wouldn't let me have anybody else that I did want. All I could do-do you want me to tell you about it?”
“This is a hell of a time to talk about your little fag. Why don't you go back to him? Go right now.”
“I'm not going back with him. I'll think of something else to do tomorrow.”
“Balls.”
“I had to dress up like a man, and then he did something to me. I didn't even feel like a woman. It wasn't the same. It wasn't at all like when you jazz me.”
“My god, do we have to talk about that now?”
Ruth looked up from under my prick. She sat up then, and shrugged me away when I tried to push her down on her back.
“Wouldn't it be the same if I stayed with you now? Would anything be changed from what it was before I went with him? Would it?”
“It's just that I've never had anybody run out on me to live with a damned fag,” I said. “I've become a sort of a bad joke to myself.”
Ruth lay down again the way she had been, and she held my prick in her two hands and petted it. She rubbed her nose along the side of it and put the end of it up against her nostrils, smearing them with its wetness.
“My nose is shiny,” she said.
She wrinkled her nose and looked cross-eyed down at the tip of it and tried to touch it with her tongue. She rubbed the stuff off on her arm, and then she lay there and rubbed her mouth with the end of my prick until her lips had the stuff on them too. She did it carefully, using my cock like a lipstick, and painting her mouth all over with it.
“Did you ever see a man do that?” she asked. “It's awful. I hope you never have to see it. You'd want to hit somebody if you did.”
“I never hit anybody any more,” I said. “I don't want to see it, though. Did Toby have his boy friends in?”
“They were there all of the time. It seemed as though it were all of the time. I thought it would be fun to watch, but it wasn't, and I had to dress up like a man and be part of it. It wasn't fun.”
“I thought he wouldn't let you have anyone else,” I said. “Wasn't that what you said?”
“He wouldn't let me go out with anybody who could fuck. Only those damn fairies. They aren't people like anybody else. They're something apart from everything and everybody in the world.”
Ruth rubbed my prick from one side to the other over her mouth. She pushed it up by her nose and brushed it with her eyelashes, brushing the end by fluttering her eyelids.
“You don't sound very sympathetic to them,” I said. “That's just the way they are, like people being white or black. You like niggers, don't you?”
“That isn't good logic. I can't get used to hearing you call them niggers, either. If you like them so much, why don't you call them black people?”
“You wouldn't understand that. That isn't good logic either. And I don't like them so much. I just like them better than whites. I'm not exactly a negrophile.”
“Then I'm not exactly unsympathetic to Toby's friends. I don't like them, but one night when Toby came home after a truck driver had beaten him up I felt awful. I thought I loved him that night, just because of that.”
She had gotten a loose lash into her eye, and she stopped to work it out. When she had it out she began again to touch her lips with my prick, but her lips were open more, and the end rubbed on the inside of them, and
