by Tania Beaton
All the fun drained out of his face, and his eyes popped as my stepbrother’s arm whipped out and his hand clamped on Gutbucket’s throat.
“You don’t so much as look at her,” he hissed, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You don’t get within breathing distance of her, get me?”
I had seen his eyes blaze like that before, the tremble of rage in his voice. He spoke in a low snarl through his clenched teeth. My throat was tight and my heart thumped.
I heard one of the cheerleaders mutter, “Well, who’d want to?” and they all doubled over in giggles.
First time I saw him, I knew that what I felt was wrong, even though I probably wasn’t old enough to know why. Was it wrong then, if I didn’t know? I never really got why it was all supposed to be so dreadfully wrong anyway. It was all way too complicated for me.
I’d heard about him from Mom and his daddy told me how I was going to like him so much. How he and I were going to be the very best of friends. We would be the closest brother and sister ever.
I was sitting on the top of the stairs in our old house. He was at the bottom. He looked so much older than me, I was kind of scared. I knew that everyone called him ‘Baz,’ except for the Asshat, his dad. He called him ‘Balt,’ which sounded completely stupid. Nobody called him by his name.
His name was from the Bible. It was the name of one of the three kings, the wise men. The Magi, some people called them. I liked the sound of that, ‘Magi.’ It was like ‘magic.’
Standing in the pool of light at the bottom of the stairs with his shaggy, curly blond hair, he looked somewhat angelic. At least, he had, until he turned to look up at me and I saw his eyes and twisty smile. I felt like my insides melted and splashed out of me, and cascaded down the steps.
It was then that I realized he could see straight up my skirt. I knew that I should move, to close my legs or pull my skirt tighter. It was kinda hard not to. But it gave me a dark sensation, a thrill that I never forgot. It was so very wrong. And I wanted it, again and again.
The Asshat was in the kitchen. I overheard him telling my Mom, “His mother was cruel and callous to give him that ridiculous name.” His eyes darkened as he overheard his father.
His blond curls bobbed as he came slowly up the stairs. An electric tingle ran from my stomach down into my panties as he came nearer. That tingle I had only felt a couple of times before. Times when something good somehow felt really bad, or when something bad felt really, really good.
He muttered in that whisper of his, said what was cruel was for his Mom to die so soon and in the way that she did. As it slipped out under his breath, I got the idea that he blamed his daddy for her dying. I didn’t really know why I thought that.
So nobody used his name and he certainly never threw it around. He was always introduced as ‘Baz,’ and that was that.
That first night they stayed over in our house, he shared my room. There wasn’t another room spare, although he could have slept on the couch in the living room. The Asshat slept in Mom’s room, of course.
In the darkness he whispered to me, and told me, “She gave me the name and I keep it special.” He shone a flashlight in my face. “You heard him diss it, so he never gets to use it.” In the darkness, the anger glowed in his eyes. “Ne.Ver.”
“I want you to call me by my real name,” he said, “But only when we’re alone. Never when there’s anyone else, anyone at all who might hear it, you understand?”
“Even Mom and your Daddy?”
His voice was hard, “Especially them.”
And that was when he told me what it was. The word crackled through me, like the tingle on the stairs and with the same charge.
Balthazar.
When Mom told me that we had to move in with Balthazar’s daddy, she said that their ‘big apartment’ was much better than our little house. I didn’t see why. It was way high in an apartment block downtown. A house seemed much better than that.
You had your own door on to the street and you didn’t have to wait for an elevator to go out or to come back in. You could open all the windows and we had a yard out back with grass and some flowers.
Balthazar’s Daddy’s apartment had what Mom said was a view of the river. That meant that you could see a couple of cranes and a big bridge, way off in the distance and through the smog. To call that a view of the river was just not right because you couldn’t see any of the water at all.
So, the next four years Balthazar and I both went to Lincoln High. As soon as he could, he upped and left, and we lost touch. Well, I lost touch with him, I guess. I don’t suppose he gave a thought to keeping in touch with me.
A bright patch in those days was the Sundays in summer when the Asshat took all of us up to the public beaches in the Hamptons.
Balthazar just had to walk on the beach and there would be half a dozen kids around him in minutes. Most of them were girls. They touched his arm or his chest. When he talked to them they tilted their heads. Touched the sides of their necks or played with their hair.
Seeing the easy way he made friends, with girls especially, always it lit a glow inside of me. A glow that carried some of the mysterious tingle. Every time I felt it from then on, it was always around him. Until he left. Since then whenever I felt it a thought of him would be in the back of my mind.
One morning Mom and the Asshat had both left early, so I had to get myself up. Never one of my special skills. Between trying to figure out coffee and something for breakfast, still bleary and in my jammies, I barged into the bathroom. Steam billowed out as soon as I opened the door and I knew this wasn’t right.
Still, nothing was right that morning, so I fumbled through the mist for the mug with my toothbrush. The shower cabinet door was open. Balthazar was crouched. Naked and glistening, his huge cock was in his hand.
His hair was wet, stuck to his face. His eyebrows creased in a steeple. He started to say my name, but his voice was hoarse.
I dropped the toothbrush and ran. My whole body tingled so much I thought I was going to implode. As I shut the door to my room and leaned with my back against it, straight away half of me twisted in agony, wishing I hadn’t blundered in on him.
The other half of me wanted to turn and bust back in there.
“All those dumb girls.” We sat on the floor by his bed one slow summer Saturday and played Riddick on his X-Box. “All they want is to tell their friends they’ve been with me. Show off a mark and say, ‘Baz gave me that’.” he winced as he did a cruel impression of our stereotypical ‘popular girl.’ “They don’t care about me, they don’t know anything about me. I’m just a goddamned trophy.”
His face twisted as he wrenched the controller. Flames burst to fill the screen.
The Asshat shouted from the hallway, “Balt! Deirdre’s here.” Deirdre Macon was the oldest cheerleader, and she was the sexiest. This was the girl that all of the jocks and the whole football team howled at and slavered over.
“I never invited her,” he scowled. “If they throw themselves at me, what am I supposed to do, but really,” he looked at me, “Do these girls have no pride at all?”
Balthazar pushed me and told me to get into his closet and hide. I said I could just slip back to my room, but in an urgent whisper he said, “No, she’ll see you,” as he shoved me into the closet.
The closet had two sides. One side had a mirror over the door, and the other door was slatted. He pushed me into the side with the slats, and I thought he must have made a mistake, because if you looked hard enough you could see inside the closet.
Deirdre wasn’t looking at the slats, so it didn’t matter.
She leaned against him, “It’s so great to see you, Baz,” and he winced at her breathy Valley-girl meets gangsta bitch voice. Well, I assumed that was what made him wince as she wrapped herself around him. Whatever it was, his wince didn’t slow the flapping of her eyelashes.
Balthazar held her face, pulled her roughly to him by the waist. “Oh, yes, Baz,” her voic
e was extra-dreamy. “Do it, Baz. Do what you want with me.”
She nuzzled him and put her lips on his neck as his hands slid all over her body. She had on a crisp white shirt and a short pleated plaid skirt over black tights. She cooed into his neck.
“I know you might want to be rough, Baz. I don’t mind. Really I don’t.”
He had her kneel on the floor, facing the closet. Looking at the mirror, I guess. He knelt behind her, putting his hands over her body. Slid over her shirt and squeezed her breasts. Then he lifted her skirt and ran his hands all over her thighs. He bit her neck and her eyes rolled.
Then he undid the first few buttons on her shirt. Her big breasts heaved, looking like they’d bust out of her black lacy push-up bra. Her breath fluttered, and she moaned as he slipped his fingers into the bra. One by one, he scooped her tits out.
My breath caught as he pulled the shirt down over her shoulders. It was still done up at the bottom, so it was like she was tied up with it. Her neck craned towards him. She planted big, wet kisses wherever she could reach his face or his neck, but he pulled away from her each time.
I tingled all over as he pulled her skirt right up, enough that I could see her white cotton panties. Her stomach rolled under her sheer black tights. I was finding it hard to keep still. The tops of my thighs were hot and wet.
When he tore her tights open, rubbed the darkening cotton of her panties, her hips writhed and snaked. Mine, too. As his fingers pressed along the center and the fabric clung to the folds of her crotch, her thighs opened and stretched apart, and my fingers found their way into my own panties.
I had to bite my wrist to keep from making a noise as he pulled up the wet, white gusset and ripped it. His fingers dove into her swollen lips, hooked inside her and hammered in and out. My own fingers did the same.
Her back arched, and her head lolled from side to side. She bit her lip as he pulled her thighs wider apart. She leaned back against him. I saw a spark of his wicked grin as he pushed her back.
Then he hauled the front of his pants open.
My fingers opened my weeping folds and rubbed over my thrumming clit as he grabbed the back of her hair. His eyes flashed right into mine as he jammed his cock in her mouth. I don’t know how she didn’t hear me as my dam burst.
I bit into my arm and gushed into my hand as all of my muscles spasmed in orgasm. I knew then how much I wanted him. I didn’t care if it was wrong or right.
My stupid Mom stayed with the Asshat, so, as soon as I possibly could, I got a place at a community college in Manhattan and a job in a bakery. In Orange, New Jersey, I shared a tiny, dark brown room with a billion roaches.
Half the time that I had for my studies was in the mornings and evenings, rattling on the train to and from Manhattan. I had to try to read or even write essays standing up and jammed between grey commuters.
Relationships for me were rare, brutish and short. I had a particularly horrible breakup with a boy who was more interested in my weight than I was—and not out of any concern about my health. I quickly began to suspect that he was much more interested in my weight than he was in the person inside it or anything else about me.
After the screaming about stupid possessions, I was exhausted and miserable as well as being about to flunk college.
Even after all the work, all the damned double shifts and all the money that I’d sunk into it, I was going to flunk out. My professor told me, “You need to get some proper sleep. You aren’t putting enough effort into your work.”
Well, duh! I was putting in more than enough effort, it’s just that most of it had to go on working to pay for my classes, my books, and my rent. Even though I lived way out in my tiny, toxic room in an Orange, NJ brownstone that should have been condemned in the 1900s, I still had hardly enough money to feed myself.
Wandering dejected around downtown Manhattan on a sunny afternoon, I felt totally alone and miserable. Lost in familiar surroundings. Like a zombie, I passed the hip lunchtime shoppers in Union Square. Meandering up Broadway and past the Flatiron in the hazy heat, I barely registered the spicy scents of lunch vendors in the amiable bustle around Madison Square Park.
Following nothing but my feet, I drifted alone through the crowds, up Madison and across to Park Avenue. Down by Grand Central, I saw a Hamptons Jitney minibus pull up. On a whim, I jumped on the little bus and took off for an afternoon at the beach.
The Jitney was full of immaculately dressed refugees from Manhattan to the Hamptons. Quiet voices with long vowels spoke the weary drawl of Long Island natives.
The long journey soothed me. As the dark, shiny Hudson slipped by below the ridge, the high canyons of the city gave way to scraggy suburbs. Along the endless roadwork delays and stop-start of the Long Island Expressway, I thought, This must be one of the worst-named roads on the planet.
Four passengers alighted at the Southampton stop with me. None of them wore drab jeans and dirty sneakers, or a grayish t-shirt. None of the other passengers departed without a car to meet them or an SUV parked nearby.
The route on foot from the Jitney stop to the beach came back to me like I was there yesterday. The bigger sky and a little salt in the breeze lifted my step as I crossed the dry grasses and my feet sank into the pale sand.
It wasn’t a place people came to be miserable. Or ‘contemplative.’ I wasn’t the only person on the beach carrying their shoes, but I was the only one wearing normal clothes. Everyone else wore this season’s beach colors, the shorts all at exactly this week’s length, t-shirts with this morning’s logo or ironic slogan.
More than that, I probably stood out for not wearing expensive shades. It didn’t matter to me. My life was heading for such a drab wreck, I couldn’t care less how I appeared. After I wandered a while in the salty air, my eyes drifted gradually up from the sand and found the misty horizon.
At that point, I had no clue whether I could make up enough grades to pass the year, or even if it was worth trying at this point. Next year, I’d only have to work even harder than I did this year, just to stay in place.
If I did flunk, then all that I’d worked for and spent on classes would be wasted–I didn’t believe at that point that I’d ever find the energy to go back and pick up my studies later.
On the other hand, would there be any point making the effort? Wouldn’t I just be throwing good money after bad? A shudder went through me, like it did whenever I caught a cliché that I associated with the Asshat.
It was only because of him that I knew this beach though. Him and Balthazar. The bright afternoon wasn’t exactly cheering me up, but at least getting some distance had lightened the load some. It all seemed as awful as it had back in the city, but out on the ocean shore, it didn’t feel as if it mattered quite so much.
Hunger called, and I looked around for somewhere to get food. It was stupid of me not to eat in Union Square or Madison Square Park where food would have been way less expensive than out here. I was determined to find something that I would enjoy, though.
I’d scrimped as long as I could remember. This one afternoon was going to be mine, even if it meant walking a couple of miles for a train back.
A white clapperboard cafe in the distance had a wide deck around the outside. Gray roofs sloped to the surrounding tufts of pale grasses and my pace picked up as I trudged towards the promise of refreshment.
When I stepped up onto the deck, a waiter in smart whites with a sliver tray gave me a look up and down. Most of the tables were vacant and heavy white linen tablecloths rose just a little in the sea breeze.
I picked a table in the shade, the one with the most empty space around it. Solitude wasn’t a great comfort, but I wasn’t ready to give it up yet. The same waiter gave me a sideways glance as he set a menu card on the tablecloth in front of me. He raised an eyebrow as he stood with his pad poised.
