It’s not supposed to be like this. Rick and Sarah are playful and affectionate with each other. Same for his dad and Pearl. But between him and the Mutant, there’s a cold fucking cosmos. It’s like they were in a transmatter machine when they were doing it and the machine shit the bed and blew their molecules all over several light-years. Frigging cold light-years.
At the stoplight, he glimpses Sergeant Woods in his cruiser in the supermarket parking lot. Rick’s dad waves casually at him. The light changes and Sam has to drive on, wondering if the policeman noticed the truck in the Playground lot again.
The question fades immediately as he heads for home.
The way it felt. Even if he wasn’t very good at it, it was still—compelling. Somehow it was both less and more than what he had imagined. Of course it was a shitty place—that mattress had a feel and a smell to it, too, he’d be happy to forget. Maybe it was being with her. Maybe it would be totally wonderful with a girl he loved and who loved him. It was all mixed up, the incredible sensations and the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach at what he was doing and the person he was doing it with. To. Knowing too late she didn’t like it. Not much, anyway. And finding out there was something inside him that didn’t care how it was for her as long as that tight slippery heat was massaging his hard-on. Which made it even more of a cheat that he’d left her hung up.
He knows things about her now. What she looks like naked and what she feels like, inside and out. Her body is seamless, and despite its bruises and scabs, perfect in her way. Her clitoris was easy to find, contrary to what he had been led to expect, but she doesn’t like it touched. Though she is so much smaller than he is, they fit all right. It makes him hot inside and out, recalling details. Her hot wet mouth engulfing the head of his cock, the sensation of her sucking it.
He pushes a button to scan the radio for a harder-rocking station and then presses down on his crotch. Another surprising thing is he’s more, not less, horny. He has to resist the sudden impulse to turn around, go back to the Mill, and ask her to try again. It must be something to feel a woman’s orgasm with her. Maybe if he could make it work for her, it would fix everything else between them. Probably not, though.
She is probably right—in the run of things, no big deal. No reason to be disappointed. The thing stood on its own, like a badly executed play that worked, barely. It was over. It wasn’t like he had been planning on dying cherry. It was going to happen with someone, sometime. She wasn’t even the first girl who ever made him the offer but somehow he’d always been able to keep his head before. It was past time—and that was why he wound up with her. It suregod wasn’t true love. And while he’s being straight with himself, how about admitting she turns him on not in spite of her freakiness but because of it. What’s that make him? Just another hard-on, really.
The irony strikes him that on quitting the team, he has gone straight out to join the rest of the dicks. But what possible difference could one more guy make to the Mutant? He’s just a drop in her ocean.
What she said—it seemed like she meant to keep it between them but she’s contrary and unpredictable. So what if she struts it around the girls’ room? He doesn’t have to answer the question, if it ever comes up. Just keep his cool, shrug and keep on going. What’s between him and her, that’s their business and nobody else’s.
Deep in the guts of an old beater, Reuben doesn’t look up until Sam’s shadow darkens his view. He smiles at the sight of the boy.
“Letter from Frankie on the desk.”
With the flimsy sheets of his brother’s letter in one hand, Sam shuffles the mail for a Department of Motor Vehicles invitation to be tested for his motorcycle license, though he knows it’s much too soon to expect anything. Satisfied the DMV isn’t nearly as excited at the thought of putting him on his ride as he is, he works his way through Frankie’s thanks for various Christmas remembrances and big-brother advice to him on the care and feeding of the bike.
His father wipes greasy fingers through a rag and asks how practice went.
Trying to work out a way to tell him he has quit the team, Sam faces Reuben but before he can’t do it, his father’s gaze moves past him, out the window to the pumps. Customers. Only when Sam glances around, it’s Coach’s Connie pulling in. With Rick Woods riding shotgun. Coach didn’t come all the way from Greenspark to buy gas. In fact, from the expression on Coach’s face, it looks like a shitstorm delivery to Sam.
Might as well jump.
“I qu-quit the team,” Sam says.
Reuben’s face remains impassive for a second as he continues to work the rag around his fingers. He attacks the grime without irony. The process is ceaseless and futile, for despite the use of protective solvents, particles of oil and grease are embedded in the upper layers of his epidermis and driven deep under his nails and into the quick so that even when he all but flays his hands with harsh soaps and brushes, even when there is no visible dirt, they still smell of petrochemicals. The act of rag-cleaning his hands is a placeholder, Reuben’s equivalent of a cigarette.
“Pardon?”
Sam raises his voice. “Quit. I quit the frigging team.”
The anger he hears in his voice surprises him as much as it does his father.
Coach fumbles at the door and bursts into the office, with Rick Woods behind
