Closes his eyes, the better to feel. She lifts her head and brings her good cheekbone next to his, as if they were dancing. Her body reverberates with silent laughter against his as she touches the left cushion of the headphones he is still wearing. Tracing her scar with the tip of his tongue from nose to ear and back again, it feels to him like a chain of silky pearls, irregular nodes knitted along a cool smooth string. He licks over her upper lip and to the corner of her mouth. She opens it and takes in his tongue.
She’s been in his laundry again. His old T-shirt she’s using for a nightshirt still smells like him. Inside the slack billow of the shirt, her tits curve into his hands and he shivers. She’s got nothing else on.
She puts her hands inside his sweatpants and he closes his hand over hers on his cock. They pull his pants down together, and she folds over him and her mouth is wet and hot on his knob, and it feels like she’s sucking the roots of the hair on his head.
He shudders all over and then she raises her head and all he can do is gasp and take the slippery darting of her tongue in his mouth. Her sex is in his hand, the silky pleat rolling over his palm. He slips in two fingers to churn the muscular channel. His thumb knuckles the heel of her sex and she jerks against him.
He slides his fingers out and his cock into her, tilts her into his hands and she arches to take him. Her hands find the small of his back, urging him deeper. Rocking gently with her, he wishes this could last forever. When he looks at her, she looks back with amazed, amused curiosity; what’s happening here? Reaching up, he tips his headphones upside down, brings their faces cheekbone to cheekbone again, and widens the arc of the diadem so the right earpiece is available to her and the left to him. It makes them laugh to share the throb of the music, using it like an aural waterbed to reinforce their rhythm. He tilts her more, lifting her knees, pressing them back until she grasps the back of his neck as if she is falling and the contact of their genitals is complete, the movement is slight and intense. Her fingers clutch at the chains around his neck. Everything’s hot and tight and ready to explode.
“Do it!” he chokes. “Do it!”
“Ohhh,” she gasps, and then she hiccups. He can’t help laughing and she laughs too. A few seconds later, he urges her again and she’s happening with him.
It feels like falling, each cell rippling, whispering into its own exquisite tawny bloom, the sharp edges melting, dissolving, yielding into gravity, whickering through the golden fold of moment. Her body. The molten core spinning into lightness, a spark falling through space into themselves again, the fan closing. She stutters consonants to match, bursting out of her in a storm of shards.
Next to Pearl, Reuben rises to one elbow. “Baby again,” he says. “I’ll go.”
Pearl’s fingers close around his wrist. “No,” she murmurs.
He pats her hip. “Go back to sleep. I heard the baby. I’ll see to her.”
Pearl opens one eye briefly. “Wasn’t the baby,” she mumbles.
Reuben scratches his head. “Sammy’s having a bad dream?”
A slow smile curves Pearl’s mouth. “No, dear,” she sighs. “That was Deanie.”
“Oh.” Reuben tugs his right earlobe. “Sounded like it was on this floor to me.”
Pearl rolls to her side and snuggles against him. “It was. From Sam’s room.”
Still logy with sleep, and distracted by his wife’s hand on his thigh, Reuben can’t quite absorb it. He wonders why Deanie and Sam have swapped rooms. “What’s she doing there?”
“Coming, from the sound of it.”
“What!” Reuben sits up and stares at her. “With Sammy?”
Pearl’s soft laughter makes him feel like an idiot. “She’s in his room. You want odds?”
He starts to swing his legs from the bed and Pearl catches him by the forearm.
“Get back into bed,” she hisses. “This minute. You leave them the hell alone.”
Reuben sinks back onto the bed. “Sammy?” he asks incredulously. “Deanie?”
He lies back down and stares at the ceiling.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “She’s such a freak. Are you sure?”
Pearl sits up. “Men,” she says, bemused.
“She is,” Reuben insists. “Sammy? He’s really got that little bald girl in there with him and—?”
“And. He made her come.”
Reuben smiles. “That’s right.”
For a moment they are both silent.
“And in the morning,” Reuben mutters, “I’m gonna boot his ass all over the yard. Is he out of his mind?”
“Of course he is. Calm down and go to sleep. He’s been downstairs with her nearly every night since he brought her here. This didn’t start tonight and it can wait until tomorrow for you to take official notice.”
He tugs her close and takes a deep breath. She closes her eyes.
Sam claps his hand over Deanie’s mouth too late. They both freeze. Carefully, Sam dislodges his headphones and reaches up to kill the tape player. Reuben and Pearl have some brief conversation in their bedroom while he and Deanie look at each other. Silence descends and they let out their breaths and suddenly they are struggling to control an outbreak of the giggles. It takes them a while to settle down.
Reuben continues to stare at the ceiling. Girl’s sixteen, that’s something. But. Scalped and scarred and tattooed. Nevermind the hook shot, she’s an acidhead and a potsmoker and cheap as dirt. He’s heard enough about her, sitting in the bleachers and listening to
