First, he spoke to her. He sat her on the vanity if they were in the ladies’ room and stood between her legs where he could whisper in her ear. As he did this, he rubbed her legs softly, each stroke moving more and more up toward where they both knew he was headed. He would kiss and nibble on her ear, kiss all along her ear and slowly move his lips closer and closer to hers, all the while speaking soft beauty to her.
Then they would kiss and at these times they would kiss a lot. They would keep kissing even after Mary started to indicate that she was worried about time.
“Anything gonna burn?”
“No.”
“Anything gonna boil over?”
“No.”
“The hell with it then.”
For his own part, Bill would have offered her Quaaludes, but he was ever conscious of her vulnerability. Having lost Yulie to drugs, knowing she had kids and the kids were dependent upon her, he didn’t feel as if he should encourage any regular substance usage. She already smoked weed and drank beer, wine and bourbon. Bill reasoned that that was enough for her.
So he would hold her in place and kiss her face, all over, sweetly, lovingly. Then he would start kissing in other places, all other places.
Eventually, Mary would help him undo enough of her clothes so they were still on her but not in the way. Eventually, she would just close her eyes and lean her head back against the mirror over the vanity. Eventually she would simply allow him to do anything and everything he wanted to do to her.
And that’s exactly what he would do at times like this. Since he’d learned, and after all he was a college graduate, exactly what she liked and how she liked it, at times like these he did those things he knew completely crazed and satisfied her, and he didn’t stop until he knew she was completely satisfied. He knew when she was completely satisfied because that’s when she would say “goddammit,” pushing him away with the word but pulling him closer with her arms and all of her womanhood. That’s when she was ready to be even more satisfied with him satisfying himself within her.
At some point Bill knew he should never have allowed himself to be in such a situation. On some level he knew he should never have fooled around on his fiancé, not ever, not with anyone. Still and all, on some whole other level, he was just twenty, soon now to become twenty-one and a young married man who had virtually no experience to speak of with women except for the live-with girl Pam. He kept thinking there had to be more, there had to be things he was meant to learn and experience.
That his fiancé might be thinking the same things never occurred to him. He didn’t think much about that. He didn’t think much about that because overall he was angry, very angry deep inside himself. He was angry that his mother left him. He was angry that he couldn’t approach his father to get help when he needed it, that in effect his father had left him too. He was angry the cops had lied and the judge knew the cops were lying. He was angry that it didn’t matter that he hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. He was angry that he had actually done something really good, really altruistic, and that regardless, he had to pay for it with his life, with the direction into which his life was forced.
Shit.
So that’s how he reasoned all of what he should never have been doing in the first place. It wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t so bad and somehow he and Mary were meant to have found this time to be united in the ways they were united.
But things were festering. They were festering all over the place.
