He ran his hand down the girl’s body.
He said, “Shana?”
There was an explosion next to him in the bed.
The sheet was flung, kicked up into the air.
A fist pounded down hard on the muscle below his right shoulder blade.
A hand gripped the muscle of his right shoulder. Another gripped his right hipbone.
He was flipped over onto his back.
She sat on the base of his stomach.
She was slapping his head, face, shoulders with both hands.
In the dark he tried to find her flaying arms, grab them, protect his head.
Finally he crunched his stomach muscles, sat up enough to get his arms around her back. He pulled her down to him.
She straightened her legs along his.
He rolled over on top of her.
She stretched her legs wide, hustled him inside her, gripped her legs behind his back.
It continued violent and was sudden.
Letting out a long exhale, she said: “Alixis.”
Then, almost immediately, she said: “More.”
There was more.
•
He did not realize the skin of his back was torn until the shower’s hot water hit it sometime later.
There was blood mixed with the water on the shower’s floor.
After drying off, he twisted to see the length of the gash on his back in the bathroom mirror.
Then he was sitting on the edge of his bed.
Behind him, on the bed, Alixis asked, “Anything the matter with you?”
“You cut me.”
“Oh, poor Jack.” Instantly, in the dark, the tips of her fingers ran along the cut on his back. She had known she had cut him, exactly where.
The cut was sticky and made her fingertips sticky.
He was still bleeding a little.
“Poor you,” she said. “Red blood. Red blooded boy.”
“Just thinking,” he said.
“What is poor bleeding boy thinking? Can’t afford the blood? Do you mind losing it that much?”
“If I did to you what you just did to me, I’d be in prison for twenty years.”
“Shit,” Alixis said. “I’m not the first girl who’s snuck into your bed while you were asleep and fucked your brains out.”
“No,” Jack said. “You’re not.”
“Boys like it any time, any place. Isn’t that right?”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“You all come with Everready batteries. I know that. I mean, you have it. You’ve got to give it. It’s got to go some place. Isn’t that true?”
He said, “Yeah.”
“And you can’t get pregnant.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Girls have something long considered an asset, something they can sell, give away, or not. It’s their choice.”
“And boys don’t have a choice?”
“Not if a girl wants it. Boys are sexy. They produce and produce and produce. Onto the ground or into a girl. It’s a girl’s choice to take it or not.”
“I see.”
“Boys can’t get hurt.” She knelt on the bed behind him. She folded her arms around his chest. She put her cheek on the top of his head. “Did poor Jack get hurt?”
“You can’t hurt a boy,” Jack said, “is what you said.”
“I’m sorry I scraped your back.” Moving against him, she was smearing the blood dripping down his back onto her belly.
“It’s all right.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Stings.”
“You shouldn’t even complain about it.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“You can’t say you didn’t enjoy it.”
“I enjoyed it.”
“Boys always enjoy it.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “Boys can’t stop themselves. Good boys always enjoy it. Good boys are fucking machines. They’re just there to be fucked. And what’s also nice is that they never complain.”
“No,” Jack said. “Never.”
She clutched his hair with her fingers and pulled his head back, way back. Her other hand clutched his extended throat, his neck muscles, and squeezed.
Her lips found his mouth. She forced her tongue through his lips, his teeth, into his throat.
He had to twist toward her. Again he wrapped his arms around her arms, around her back.
Alixis said: “More.”
There was more.
13
“You have a cut on your back.”
“Yes.” While Jack was raking the Japanese garden, Radliegh’s secretary, Nancy Dunbar, had come into the garden with a cup of coffee. She sat on the bench she and Jack had used the day before and lit a cigarette.
“Don’t let it get sunburned,” she said, “or you’ll have a scar there forever.”
“I know.”
It was early Saturday morning. Jack was in the shade of the garden’s wall.
“Do you have anything to tell me?” Nancy Dunbar asked.
His first time doing such a thing, Jack was trying to make an interesting design on the garden’s sand with his rake.
Did he have anything to tell her? In Nancy Dunbar’s words, “Any plans you hear anybody make; if you see people together you think don’t belong together; comments you hear people make about each other, Mr. Beauville, me, Doctor Radliegh….”
Only a few hours before, in the dark of his bedroom, he had found himself sucking his own blood from the tits of Doctor Radliegh’s younger daughter.
Jack had heard that same daughter say she didn’t care if her father was murdered; had heard Duncan Radliegh admit he had cheated to graduate from college, lied about applying to any business school, considered disobeying and selling stock in Radliegh Mirror to support his car racing interest and, Jack surmised, his drug habit.
He had seen the elder son, Chet, All-American quarter back, betrothed to Shana Staufel, demand sexual attention from the stableboy.
He knew there was a duffel bag full of beer under Peppy’s bed.
He had seen Doctor Radliegh himself and Shana Staufel sitting on a bench in a rose garden at dusk talking quietly while holding hands.
