by Pepper Pace
The sensations that his lips brought to me were incredible. All I could think over and over was Oh my god…oh my god…
I felt him trembling suddenly and he took his mouth from me and pressed himself against my thigh. And it was like a third person in bed with us; his penis writhing and pushing against my hip and leg. I watched him as he squeezed his eyes closed, fighting for control.
I reached down and touched it lightly. When Kenny didn’t still my exploring fingers I lightly stroked him.
He groaned and squirmed and I pulled my hand back. Once I stopped touching him he let out a slow breath and relaxed. I slid the covers off of us and looked at him. I wanted to know this part of him, understand it. I reached out again, tentatively, and Kenny rolled over on his back allowing me to fill my curiosity.
After a time he grew softer and I looked at him with a question. He took my hand and placed it over his fading erection and showed me how to manipulate him back to hardness. He blinked and sighed, then stroked my breasts allowing his fingers to glide downward. Lightly he allowed his fingers to part the lips between my legs and he stroked that place where the tingliness always began.
“Oh! Kenny…” I moaned. My head tossed back and forth. “Ohhhhh…” I groaned. His fingers moved rhythmically and I gripped him, sliding my closed fist up and down his shaft the way he’d just shown me.
With a gasp of his own he brushed my hand away and rolled on top of me. He positioned himself between my legs and I spread them so that he could snuggle comfortably. His tongue plunged into my mouth and I sucked and pushed my pelvis against him, wanting him to fill me. I wanted him inside of me where it was hot and wet from love and not the horrible thing the doctor had done.
Kenny reached between us and slipped the tip of his penis between the swollen lips down below.
I sucked in a ragged breath when it touched my clitoris—and then I was suddenly going over, like a canoe over Niagara Falls! Gently, Kenny pushed himself into me.
I yelped at the shock of pain, but I was already climaxing and the pain was secondary to my need to thrust forward and urge him deeper into me. He followed my movements seeming to chase and catch up to me with his thrusts until finally we caught up to one another and crashed, sending an explosion through my entire body. Squeezing my eyes closed, I saw flashes of colors, reds and greens behind my lids.
“Oh!” He suddenly moaned. “Ohhh…” Then he quickened the pumping of his pelvis against me, stopping suddenly to pull out, stroking himself to orgasm onto my thigh.
Kenny collapsed against me, his head nestled against my neck and neither of us moved for almost a full minute trying to catch our breaths.
“Are you okay, Jamie?” He panted, lifting his head tiredly to look at me.
I just grinned. “I can’t believe…it was…” Unable to find the words I just met his eyes and nodded.
He leaned over to kiss my lips. “I’ve never felt anything like that before, either. It’s never been like this…”
“You promise?”
“I swear it.” He sat up on his elbow and watched me solemnly. “I never want to be with anybody but you.”
“Me either, Kenny.”
“I love you, Jamie.”
“I love you.”
***
I really needed a nap, instead we got up and showered together. I hurt more than ever and there was more blood, so there was no thought of anything else happening. I pulled on fresh pajamas. The medicine had made me lightheaded and lethargic so I went back to bed while Kenny went downstairs to nuke himself semi burnt pancakes and sausage. Then before my sisters got home he left, promising to return that night.
Time passed as time does and Kenny kept to his word to come over and sleep each night. My Daddy and I rebuilt our relationship but it had changed…that could not be denied. It seemed that he was forced to allow me to be the adult that circumstances had long ago pushed me into…and that he himself had helped to exploit. It was a relationship involving tiptoeing around each other but it was a relationship that eventually had forgiveness in it.
A few months later Kenny found himself small jobs to do where he could get paid under the table. I think that made him feel good about himself and he made friends with people at work. It was nice when he came over and told me something funny about the people he worked with. But best of all, Kenny wasn’t homeless anymore. He now could crash with his friends and that made him more confident. He wasn’t the only one to gain confidence.
I accepted the fact that at fourteen I was far from a little girl. I was comfortable in my own skin and the kids at school sensed it. And they in turn began to treat me differently. Boys wanted to date me and girls wanted to call me on the phone and by the next year I wasn’t the little geeky girl hiding behind ball caps and oversized glasses.
It didn’t matter because Kenny was all I wanted. I was in love with him, like he controlled my next breath. The only major change in our relationship was that I introduced Kenny to my family as my boyfriend. I was never so happy in my life when my family accepted him.
Kenny would come over every day and Daddy even jokingly referred to him as his 4th child since he was always around. At night Kenny would walk out the front door and then climb right into my window. For me, it was a perfect existence and I felt like I was in a fairytale.
But all good things eventually come to an end.
Kenny’s 18th birthday had come on a Wednesday and I was making plans with his money. I wanted us to get a hotel on Saturday so that we could spend all day luxuriating in each other’s arms…no interrupting younger sisters and no fear of Daddy coming upstairs. I’m amazed that we never got caught in the years that we’d been together…but I guess not really. Daddy left me alone to be responsible for my own actions. I’m sure he knew, but he never spoke of it.
Lately I thought that Kenny had been acting strange. He’d stare at me when he didn’t think I noticed and he grew quieter and quieter. As I was giving him birthday ideas, Kenny suddenly turned to me. We were lying on the daybed; the very same one we’d made love on thousands of times before.
“Jamie…I’ve been thinking about something for a while now.”
My heart began to quicken. Somehow I knew that what he was going to say was going to forever change my life, still I wasn’t prepared.
“Okay.”
He sighed. “I’ve watched you go to school and prepare for a future…maybe college. I know that I’m not prepared. I haven’t been to school since I was 15.” I touched his hand. He was smarter than any boy in my school.
“Kenny, I don’t care about that-”
He smiled with those familiar, haunted eyes. “I…love you enough to want to better myself. Jamie I enlisted in the Armed Services.” He clamped his mouth shut in resignation.
“You did what?”
“I’ve enlisted.”
I shook my head. “Why didn’t you talk to me before-?”
“Because,” he interrupted, “there’s unrest in the Middle East-”
“I know!” I cried.
“…and I know there’s a risk…and I know how selfish it is for me to take that risk.” He reached out to stroke my face as I stared at him, stunned. I could hardly breathe…Kenny was so much a part of my life; of my day to day life that without him here was unthinkable…and add to that the possibility that he’d be killed? I was speechless and could barely hear the words he spoke telling me all the things he’d be able to accomplish.
I just rushed to my feet. “You can’t do this. You just have to tell them no. You can go get your GED, Kenny-”
Kenny stood, his eyes seeming to probe deeply into my own. “No Jamie. It’s done and I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Get the hell out.” I screamed. He didn’t immediately move. “GET OUT!” Reluctantly Kenny lowered his head and left. I was just in a panic. All I could do was pace, trying to swallow back my hysteria. My love, my heart…my world was leaving…
I refused to talk to Kenny in
the two weeks before he was due to ship out. He didn’t force it. He called me, he came by the house. It was Daddy that finally bammed on my bedroom door and put the telephone in my hand.
“I wanted to talk to you before I shipped out,” he pleaded.
Hearing those words sent another sharp stab to my heart.
“I…did too.” I said distantly, fighting to keep a calm detachment to my voice. Kenny had made up his mind…and that was that. “Kenny, I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking about things. And I thought about the benefits like how you can have your education paid for, your housing, specialized training—I hear you! But you’re not doing this for me. Because I don’t need that!” I could feel myself getting angry and my voice growing more passionate. “You are leaving me, and that’s all I can see-”
“But I’m coming back to you.”
God willing…”I know what it’s like to lose someone. I don’t have blinders on. Maybe you will, but maybe you won’t. Because it’s not completely under your control, now is it? And then we’re apart…you on the other side of the world, me graduating from high school, going on to college. Our lives are going to keep moving on--separately. So maybe you will come back…but maybe you won’t.” My voice begin to rise in barely contained hysteria “You have two years to give Uncle Sam... You made your decision without my input, and I’ll do the same. Just…call me when you’re done with it!” I clicked off the phone, clicked it back on so I wouldn’t know whether he called back or not, then I lay down for my usual long weeping session.
Daddy told me a few days later that Kenny had shipped out. This time I was all cried out. When I received his first postcard I read it 50 times in one day. It was the last one that I’d ever read. After that I wrote return to sender on anything Kenny ever mailed to me. My sisters didn’t understand me…hell, I didn’t understand me. I only understood that he had ended 'US.’ He did it willfully and intentionally and I did everything afterwards to protect myself.
My sisters saw it as a game to leave his letters and gifts on my bed so that I’d be forced to carry them back to the mailbox or open them out of curiosity…My family wouldn’t fully understand until that Thanksgiving when Kenny was due to return for his first leave. Daddy was making up the spare room for him, I’m sure it was his way of helping ‘us’ since he’d never offered to let Kenny sleep over before.
I took money out of my college fund and left town for 10 days. Nobody could find me, I didn’t call to tell anyone I was ok, though they’d seen me pack so they didn’t think I’d tipped off the deep end or anything. But it scared my family enough to understand that this was no game of guilt-tripping. I had cut out the pain. The result was that my family stopped pushing and Kenny stopped sending letters and calling.
And that’s the way it stayed. When I graduated from high school, there were a dozen red roses waiting on the front stoop. No card attached. And the next Thanksgiving I took a ten day cruise, and on Christmas I went skiing with some college friends.
The absence of Kenny was like the absence of half of my heart and one’s body cannot function properly with only half a heart. I did not function properly without Kenny. I became a colder and more distant person. I did not open my heart to anyone. Though I dated, each person was a potential heartbreak waiting to happen.
As I made plans for my 20th birthday I’d become a studious bookworm. I’d grown into a very tall and still very thin person. And as I’d predicted, I still didn’t have much boobs to speak of. But my curvaceous frame amplified my femininity. I’d cut off my long locks into a boycut that sometimes had spiky bangs and sometimes I let lie flat to my scalp. My glasses were replaced with contact lenses but sometimes I just didn’t care to put them in and I had wire frames for the lazy times... It would never cease to amaze me when a man would take a double look at me, and more times than not it was an unwelcome distraction.
One evening the doorbell rang after I’d gotten home from my nighttime college course. I’d decided to live at home in order to save money because I wanted to help Bea and Angie go to college also. I hurried to the door opening it to the sight of a tall, broad-chested man wearing a crisp and neat uniform.
My mouth dropped.
Kenny reached up and took off his hat. His eyes widened and couldn’t seem to leave the sight of me.
“Jamie…Hello.”
So much time had passed between us, but I still wanted to run away, slip into my bed and cover my head with my pillow.
“Kenny.” My mouth just stayed open in surprise. “You look so different.”
He did too. He’d grown broad, no longer wiry and thin. And his voice was different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but his voice was somehow older. Ahh, the twang was mostly gone.
“I know you don’t want to see me, but I was wondering if I could come in for a bit. I’m not going to be in town for long, but I wanted to come by.” I tried not to let those words affect me, but they made me wonder.
“Sure,” I finally spoke. I opened the door to let him in. God, he had grown taller….
“Where’s the family?” That’s right, I thought. This had been as much his home as any other. His dinners and holidays had always been spent here with me. I closed the door after him.
“Nobody stays home much anymore. Bea and Angie have their friends to hang out with and Daddy started seeing a woman about a year ago. So they’re always going places together.” I led him into the living room.
He looked around. “This room hasn’t changed one bit.” There was nostalgia in his voice, but not sad; a happy reverie. Why were fucking tears forming in the back of my eyes already?!
I gestured for him to sit. “Do you want something to drink?” I mumbled.
“No. I’m fine.”
After he sat, I sat in the armchair so that I wouldn’t have to be too close to him. I didn’t want to feel this way. But, I couldn’t help that it still felt so big in my chest. This feeling would probably never go away, just pushed back into a corner…this pain, this hurt, this betrayal.
His eyes seemed to flinch at my discomfort. “You look really beautiful.” My hand went to my hair nervously. I was wearing a nylon shirt that hugged my form and khaki pants that also hugged my hips, but flared out a bit at my calves.
“I- cut my hair.”
“It suits you.” He straightened a bit. “So you’re in college then?”
“I am. Studying business.” He nodded in interest. “And you?” I didn’t want to ask it but I knew that it was expected of me. This was just going to bury the knife into my soul deeper; he’d moved on and so had I….
“Well I’m studying communications and technology. I have one degree already.” He looked into the distance. “I’m on leave now, I’ll need to ship out tomorrow.” He looked at me then.
I held his gaze, almost defiantly. “So you must like the Army, then?” His two years were up, he must have signed on for another tour.
“Not always. But it serves its purpose.”
I nodded some more. “Yeah. Well that’s good.” I stood up quickly. “I’m sure you’ll—do well.” I gestured to the other room. “I’ve got to study—big test-” I said awkwardly.
Kenny stayed seated. “I’ve been all over the world, seen all kinds of things. Some of them I sent to you, with letters and postcards…but they came back. It was kind of hard experiencing all of that without my best friend to share it with.”
I looked at everything in the room except Kenny, as tears stung my eyes.
“I make a good living too. Most of my paycheck I just bank, I don’t need much to live off of. You of all people know that I can make do with next to nothing.”
The first tear streamed down my cheek and I stood there wanting to run away.
“I put in for a house off base. They’re not big like this, but they are awfully nice... I asked to be stationed close so that you can stay near your family and there are plenty of good colleges-”
My head sprung around to his direction. “What-?”
He gave me a long look. “I told you I’d come back. I want to marry you Jamie. I want to marry you now. I wanted to marry you back when I turned 18-”
“But instead you…left me!” I swiped away my angry tears.
Kenny stood up slowly. A sigh seemed to relax his tension. He held his hat in his hands. “You’re right. I did leave you.” I sighed. That admission seemed to let loose years of anxiety. Now I could hear what he was saying instead of trying to force him to understand me. And listen I did.
