So Willing

by Lawrence Block

  He grabbed her arm, pulling her back down on the sofa. “We’ve got fifteen minutes yet,” he said. “All that’s on now is news and weather. Who cares about news and weather?”

  She was half-turned, facing him, and she smiled again, her eyes brighter than ever. “Nobody does,” she said. And when he reached for her, she came soft and eager into his arms.

  But it wasn’t as easy as he’d thought. She let him French kiss her, she let him fondle her breasts and slide his hand up the inside of her leg, she let him push the sweater up and open her bra, she let him touch the bare breasts, pinching the hard tips gently between his fingers, kissing her breasts, but when his hand, beneath her skirt, slid up to grab the waist of her panties and slide them down, she pulled away from him at once, pushing the offending hand away, whispering, “No, Vince. We can’t go that far. No.”

  He was obedient, that time. He let his hand slide down again across her silk-covered belly, and pulled her close to kiss her again, to touch her breasts with fingers and lips and tongue.

  He waited. Stroking her, kissing her, caressing her, nipping her flesh with his teeth. He waited until her eyes were closed and her mouth was open and her breath was loud and short and ragged, her arms limp and weak around him, her hips writhing and revolving on the sofa. Then he made the move again, and this time she didn’t stop him, and her panties slid away to the floor. And when he touched her, she groaned and clutched him tight to her.

  He undressed her there in the living room, piece by piece. The sweater went and the bra, and finally the skirt. And when she was nude and pliant in his arms, he whispered, “Let’s go upstairs.” And she nodded, whispering, “Yes, Vince, yes.”

  She led the way up the stairs and he followed, pulling off his shirt and undershirt on the way. She walked ahead of him, her firm round buttocks moving as she climbed the stairs, and he stroked their roundness, wanting to bite them.

  Up on the second floor, he started into the first bedroom he came to, but she said, “No, that’s my sister’s room. My room is down here.”

  “Your sister.” He hadn’t known there was a sister. He suddenly felt cold. What if the sister were to come in while he was in the bedroom with Betty? There’d be hell to pay.

  His thoughts must have shown on his face, for she laughed and said, “Don’t worry. She doesn’t live here anymore. She got married two years ago and moved to Denver.”

  “Oh.” Weak with relief, he hurried after Betty to her bedroom.

  He had his clothes half off, holding them in one hand. When they reached the bedroom he whipped the rest off right away. He knew the danger in letting the emotion of the moment be washed away by too much time spent on the mechanics of the thing, on the moving to the proper room or from the front seat to the backseat of the car, or getting the clothes off. The mechanics had to be gotten over and done with fast, before they could spoil the mood.

  Her room was large and airy and girl-styled, but he didn’t notice a thing in it except the three-quarter bed. The covers were turned neatly back, the sheets were crisp and clean, and already he could visualize Betty atop the bed and himself atop Betty.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and raised her arms to him, smiling. He came into her arms, sat beside her, kissed her and stroked her, slowly laid her back and down onto the bed.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered, reassuring her. “You don’t have to worry, I won’t hurt you.”

  They were lying crosswise on the bed and gradually they shifted position until they were lying the right way, she on her back and he on his side next to her, still stroking her and kissing her and very gradually rolling forward onto her.

  “I’ve never done this before, Vince,” she whispered suddenly.

  He was terrified that she would suddenly stop him at the last second, that she would realize she was about to become an ex-virgin, and wouldn’t go through with it. “I know,” he whispered. “But don’t worry, Betty, wonderful wonderful Betty, don’t worry.”

  “You’ve got to promise,” she whispered, and her hands were suddenly firm against him, not pushing him away but not letting him get any closer either. “You’ve got to promise,” she repeated, “not to ever tell anybody. Not anybody.”

  “I never will,” he promised fervently. “I’d never do a thing like that.”

  “This is the first time,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “My sister,” she explained, whispering in his ear, “always told me to never do it with a boy from my own school or my own town, because that way I’d get a bad reputation. She said I should only go for boys from other towns. I’ve never done it before. You’re the first boy from our school I’ve ever done this with.”

  The full import didn’t hit him for a couple of seconds, and then he practically yelped. She wasn’t a virgin! She wasn’t a virgin, after all! He almost said it aloud, as an incredulous, shocked, screamed question: “You’re not a virgin!?” But he stifled it just in time, because that question would have ruined the whole thing. He would never been able to explain why it was so important to him that she be a virgin without destroying the mood, and without destroying his chances with her forever.

  She was still whispering to him, earnestly and matter-of-factly, and he knew at last that this girl was far from being a virgin. “So you’ve got to promise never to tell anybody. I don’t want to get a bad reputation.”

  He swallowed, forced himself to answer her. “I won’t tell, Betty. Believe me, I won’t.”

  She kissed him and smiled. “The first night we went out,” she told him, “I knew I had to have you. No matter what my sister said.”

  And who, he wondered, had been stalking whom? He felt suddenly young and inexperienced.

  “Well, come on,” she whispered. “What are you waiting for?”

  She was no virgin. There wasn’t a virgin in the world who could move like that. She was no virgin, and after thirty seconds it no longer mattered a tinker’s dam that she wasn’t a virgin. Because she was the most tremendous bed-partner he’d ever held in his arms.

  She tore him apart. She was a wild thing, grabbing him with a violence he’d never known before, squeezing him dry like a grape and flinging him away again. And it was over before it was barely begun, and he was lying beside her in the narrow bed, panting, the sweat cooling and drying on his belly and chest, as she leaned over him, kissing him, licking his face, stroking his chest.

  He regained his wind slowly, and finally started, “You—you—”

  Once again, she understood what he was trying to say. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she told him, smiling. “I checked on the calendar this afternoon. This is the safe time.”

  There were voices downstairs!

  “It’s my parents!” Her whisper in his ear was terrified.

  He crawled off the bed and to his feet. He took one step toward the door, but he could hear them coming upstairs.

  “They’ll look in here,” she was whispering. “They always look in to see if I’m asleep.”

  His wildly searching eye fell on the luminous dial of her bedside clock. It was almost four-thirty in the morning. He should have been out of here long ago, instead of falling asleep like a dope.

  “Down the fire escape,” she whispered urgently. “Hurry!”

  “My clothes!”

  “I’ll throw them down to you. Hurry, Vince, hurry!”

  He had one leg over the windowsill before he realized he was stark naked. Then he remembered the car, still parked out in front of the house. “The car,” he whispered.

  He saw the shock on her face, and thought fast. “Tell them,” he said, “tell them something went wrong with the starter, and I took a bus home, and I said I’d come back in the morning and fix it.”

  She nodded. “All right. Now, hurry.” And she ran around the room, gathering up his clothes.

  He went out the fire escape and down the wooden steps, rough against his bare feet. At the bottom step, he carefully lower
ed himself, until he was hanging by his outstretched hands, facing the street.

  Clip-clop. A horse went by, pulling a milk wagon. The milkman stared at Vince, swinging back and forth, his toes three feet from the ground, completely nude. Vince stared at the milkman, and the horse calmly clip-clopped by, and Vince’s clothes went sailing down past his face.

  He dropped to the ground, fumbled around until he had his clothes in a jumbled bundle in his arms, and ran for the backyard.

  There was a shade tree in the backyard. Hidden by it, he hurriedly dressed, then climbed over the fence to the yard of the house on the next street, out to the street, and headed for the nearest bus stop.

  “A week from now,” he grumbled to himself, as he walked along with his shoelaces flapping, “I’ll think this was funny as hell.”

  TWO

  Everything, as a matter of fact, stank. Everything stank out loud, and in spades. And with everything stinking so thoroughly it was no wonder that he wasn’t laughing himself silly.

  In a sense, you could blame everything on Betty. There she was, all pure virginal, and there he was, all ready and willing, the experienced hunter tracking down the soft-eyed doe, when all of a sudden his whole frame of reference was shattered. Betty the virgin had suddenly metamorphosed into Betty the old hand.

  That got things going to a fine start.

  When the family left two days later for the cabin on the lake he was not at all sorry to say a fond goodbye to the little town of Modnoc. He’d sprawled alone in the backseat of the car while his mother and father said stupid things to each other in the front seat, and he’d looked back at the town out of the rear window, thinking unpleasant thoughts about it.

  As the sun goes out to sea, he thought, and as our boat sinks slowly in the west, we bid a fond adieu to the sleepy town of Modnoc, with its friendly huts and its rudely plastered natives.

  The cruddy little cabin by the cruddy little lake looked a good deal better to him than it really was. The idea of staying in the same town with Betty made him feel little weak in the knees. Of course there was no reason for him to be ashamed of himself. As far as she was concerned, he was the conqueror, the only boy from Modnoc who had managed to get in her pants. From his point of view it was a little more complex. He’d been loaded for bear, and when you’re loaded for bear you can’t get too excited over blowing the tail off a squirrel.

  So the cruddy little cabin by the cruddy little lake represented two things—an escape from Betty and a chance at new fields to conquer. There would certainly be girls at the lake, plenty of them, and girls away for the summer were girls removed from the soppy security of the parental abode. If a girl was ever going to take the plunge, she was going to take it on summer vacation.

  And if anybody was ready to do the plunging for them, Vince was.

  He felt like the Great White Hunter, and he was so pleased with the picture that the discomforts of the safari failed to bother him. He didn’t mind the lousy roads, or the creative stupidity of his father who insisted on driving a steady thirty-five every inch of the way. He didn’t mind the stomach-churning food at the hot dog stands where they stopped en route, he didn’t mind the senseless patter issuing from the front seat. He was the Great White Hunter on the trail of a pack of virgins. The little hardships of the chase didn’t bother him a bit.

  When they finally got to the cabin it looked much better to him than it really was. A kitchen, furnished with colonial implements and quietly disintegrating. A bedroom for his parents. Another bedroom, incredibly small, for Vince. A living room that no one in his right mind would attempt to live in. The cabin was looking around for a president to be born in it, and anyone born there could certainly boast of humble origins.

  But Vince didn’t care. He didn’t figure he’d be spending much time there. He’d be with girls, around girls, near girls, by the side of girls.

  And, eventually, in girls.

  But things weren’t working according to plan. Right now, for example, the afternoon was in the process of becoming evening. It was cool, with a breeze coming from the lake that was just a little too brisk to be perfect. The sun was gone and the moon was starting to rise. It was perfect weather for girl-hunting, and what was he doing?

  He was sitting. Sitting quite alone by the side of the lake with nothing doing, nothing at all.

  All because of that bitch, Rhonda.

  The trouble with Rhonda was double trouble. She was impossible to touch and impossible to stay away from. The first day he saw her, which was the second day at the cabin, he knew she was going to be the one. She just had to be. She was perfect.

  For one thing, she was different from any of the Modnoc girls. She was from New York City, and this made a big difference. Not just the way she talked, but the way she looked and the way she acted. She was far more mature, far more sophisticated.

  And far more attractive.

  Of course, if Vince himself had come from New York, he would have thought that Rhonda looked exactly like everyone else. She had dark hair and she wore it long, and the ponytail that hung to her waist looked just like the ponytail of every other girl who went to Bronx Science or Walden or Elizabeth Irwin or Music & Art or New Lincoln High School. She also wore sandals and dark-colored Bermuda shorts and very plain white blouses. She was in uniform, but of course Vince did not know this.

  Vince thought she was beautiful. The purple eye-shadow was beautiful, too, and the pale lipstick. But most of all, the girl underneath all the garbage was beautiful.

  And obviously a virgin.

  She was the only one he wanted. There were other girls at the lake, but next to Rhonda they seemed pretty pallid and dull. They could have been easy, some of them. A few gave him come-on glances that meant he could have them flat on their pretty backsides just by saying the word. But he didn’t feel like saying the word, not to them.

  But Rhonda, damn her to hell, didn’t want to hear the word.

  All she wanted to do was talk, and walk around in the woods, and go out rowing on the lake, and look at the stars, and think very deep thoughts. This fooled him at first. He dated her about five minutes after he first set eyes on her, and when he asked her what she wanted to do that night she told him she wanted to go rowing on the lake.

  Which pleased Vince no end.

  Because, as everybody knew, a girl who wants to go rowing on the lake is a girl who wants to do other things. And if the girl herself suggests the rowing expedition it is an odds-on bet that the rowboat is going to get one hell of a workout.

  That wasn’t exactly the way it turned out. When Rhonda said she wanted to go rowing on the lake, that was precisely what she meant. She wanted to sit in her end of the boat and look up at the stars and think profound thoughts. That was all she wanted to do.

  Fortunately, he figured this out before he made the mistake of making a pass. Otherwise everything would have been shot to hell right at the start. But he played things very cool, very cool indeed, staying on his side of the boat and helping her stare at the stars. In between staring at the stars and leaning on the oars he did some supplementary staring at Rhonda’s breasts. The blouse she wore was trying to hide the fact that she had any breasts, but Vince had a good eye for that sort of thing. He could tell that she was built very well, soft and firm and very nice to look at, and undoubtedly still nicer to hold onto.

  She was, he decided, worth waiting for. So what if she wasn’t going to fall into his arms on the first date? Maybe things worked differently in New York.

  And, following this line of reasoning, he didn’t try to kiss her goodnight. He just stopped her at the door to her cabin, took her chin in his hand, and looked deeply into her eyes. Her eyes were brown and very soft.

  “Tomorrow night,” he said. She hesitated, then nodded, and he turned on his heel and walked off into the night. He had it made, he knew, because he had suddenly figured out Rhonda’s Dream Man. Her Dream Man was sort of a cross between Tony Perkins and Cary Grant, if such a combinatio
n was possible. Shy and deep like Perkins, polished and assured like Grant. All he had to do was play that role properly and the prize was his.

  Maybe.

  The next night was a disappointment. They took a walk to the woods, another type of scene which with any other girl would have been an obvious prelude to a more advanced form of entertainment. Not with Rhonda, however. They walked through the woods and she rambled on and on about how wonderful nature was while he half-listened and half-contemplated how wonderful nature really was.

  When he tried to kiss her goodnight she pulled away from him, her eyes very sad. “Don’t, Vince.” He didn’t say anything.

  “I like you, Vince. But it’s so…so physical, kissing and all that. I’d like us just to be friends, to share things with each other.”

  He felt like telling her something she had that she really ought to share with him. But that of course would have ruined it for good, so he played his role and hung his head and told her that he was sorry, that of course she was right, and that it was his fault that he had permitted himself to get carried away by animalistic desires.

  When he got home he took a cold hip bath, as recommended in that corny Boy Scout Manual. It didn’t help.

  And if that was bad, the next few nights were worse. Bit by bit he managed to convince her that an experience couldn’t be meaningful unless bodies as well as souls merged. While he told her this he kept his hands to himself, speaking slowly and soulfully. And she agreed, more or less.

  More or less. Oh, she wasn’t one to minimize the importance of physical love. She knew how wonderful a thing physical love could be, when two people shared everything there was to share. There was just one little catch. She herself, she explained sadly, was a cold woman. She couldn’t feel anything that way, couldn’t get excited or interested. It just didn’t do anything for her.

  “I’ll help you, Rhonda,” he told her. “Let me kiss you. Let me make you feel our love.”