"You're going back down there this weekend?" Rory's friend asked him, looking somewhat skeptical.
"Yeah," Rory nodded, taking a sip of his beer.
"Sounds like it's getting serious," Dave commented. He was happy for his friend. He just didn't like how Rory's weekly trips back to campus this summer were cutting into time for band practice.
"I... yeah, I like her a lot."
Dave smirked at Rory's understatement. "So, you tapped that ass yet?"
Rory just scowled in response. Dave grinned and took a slug of his own beer. Typical Rory. He knew his friend was as horny as the next guy, but he insisted on maintaining this golden boy facade, and he seemed to want the same thing out of the girls that he dated.
Rory, for his part, was suppressing a grin. No, he acknowledged to himself; he hadn't "tapped that ass" yet. But damn, did Kelly have an ass worth tapping. He hoped that that was where this new relationship was heading. He just didn't want to take it too fast, or appear disrespectful. Kelly was pretty, and smart, and sweet. Definitely the kind of girl you bring home to mama.
And she definitely seemed to be into him. She laughed at his jokes and engaged him smartly in conversations about classes and movies and world events. He had never heard her swear, but she didn't blush or get offended when he let one slip. Just like she had never objected or stopped him when he took the next small step toward intimacy, like cupping her breast through her blouse, or unbuttoning her shirt and opening her demure front-clasping bra to gently caress the sensitive nub of her still-unseen nipple. They seemed to be on the same wavelength that way. Indeed, if he had tried to unzip her jeans and slip his hand into her panties on the third date, he would have been a bit disappointed if she had let him. He didn't know if she was a virgin, and he hadn't asked, and going into their senior year of college, he rather thought it would be unusual if she was. And that was okay. He just didn't want her to be a slut.
He wasn't a virgin. But he still felt kind of bad that he had taken his previous girlfriend's virginity, and then things hadn't worked out. He didn't want Kelly to think of him as a slut, or whatever the male equivalent of a slut was, either. Kelly, he was thinking, was special. He wanted her to think he was special, too.
***
Rory settled into bed in his little bedroom under the stairs. When he had headed off to college his little brother had taken over the other bedroom, but that was fine; he found this little cubby to be quite comfortable and secure.
It was only 10 PM, but he was plenty tired, and the 5:30 alarm waking him for the early shift at his summer job would come soon enough. He thought about pulling out a notebook and writing Kelly a short letter, but realized it probably wouldn't get to her before he saw her again on Saturday, anyway.
And 10 o'clock was too late to call her. Plus, he had already called her once this week. Long distance calls were expensive, and his parents didn't object, but he didn't want multiple calls a week to cause them to start monitoring him.
So he propped himself up against the headboard and reached for the notebook, and started sketching her from memory. High forehead, beneath her white-blonde hair, cut in a cute bob, parted on her right, his left. Her arched eyebrows, sketched lightly to capture the same light coloring. Eyes wide and expressive, lashes long but faint, almost ephemeral; irises also rendered carefully to reflect their pale blueness around the stone-black pupils.
Her cute little upturned nose, hard to capture in this front-facing view. He frowned at his failure, but moved on to draw her mouth, her perfect pink cupid-bow lips, the bottom one especially full. Then he added the little blemish -- a beauty mark, he preferred to think of it -- on her cheek. The imperfection on this princess that made her real.
He hadn't left himself room on the page to go below her shoulders, her regal collarbones. That was okay. He could picture her breasts, inside her blouse of course; small and pert and sitting wide on her chest, leaving almost no cleavage to draw attention to herself. It would be disrespectful to draw them, at any rate.
He put the notebook on his nightstand and turned out the light. He was hard, and he gripped his erection. But he couldn't masturbate to thoughts of Kelly. That would be disrespectful, too.
In the eight years since he had first stroked himself all the way to his first orgasm, he had never been able to sully the images of girls that he liked by mere self-abuse. It just seemed wrong. So he put the girls on whom had crushes on pedestals, and only allowed himself to jerk off to fantasies about the bad girls, the sluts and town pumps and even adulterous married women who might seduce him and let him have his nasty emissions -- well, not guilt-free, but at least without defiling the good girls.
Even Maria, his first serious college girlfriend, the girl to whom he had lost his virginity -- he had never jerked off to her until after they had had sex, until he had her consent to think of her sexually.
And even then, it hadn't quite felt right. Not until after they had broken up; after he had put two and two together and he had realized that she had cheated on him on spring break. With a German foreign exchange student, in a cheap Fort Lauderdale hotel room. Then, broken-hearted, he had been able to flog himself relentlessly, every night for weeks, to the image of Maria's dark hair falling over the other guy's taut stomach, her hands and her mouth moving up and down over what had doubtless been an enormous schlong (of course, it
must
have been; he needed the image to feed his angst), long and veiny and uncircumcised, pulsing and ejaculating between the lips that he had kissed so often and so lovingly.
So that's what he did tonight, until he spurted into the kleenex, reveling in the humiliation and the shame as he imagined Gunther grunting
his
copious release into Maria's mouth. The guilt lingered for several minutes afterwards, and he told himself he would never do that again, until his breathing returned to normal and he rolled onto his side and let sleep overtake him. But at least he hadn't sullied his image of the honorable and adorable Kelly.
***
"So, how's Rory?" Malcolm asked.
Kelly sighed and broke off eye contact with the guy she was spending way too much time with, her big brother's obnoxious best friend. "He's fine," she answered, reluctantly.
"Did you have a date with him this weekend?" he prodded.
"Uh huh."
"So that's what, four? Getting pretty serious."
"Mal..." she started to say. She didn't want to talk about the new guy she was dating, but Malcolm was insistent. And used to getting what he wanted.
"And I wasn't even here this weekend to check in on you," Malcolm continued. That was true. One of his favorite games was telling her that her big brother "wanted him to keep an eye on little sister" for him. But Malcolm had gone to Toledo this weekend to see his fiancé. "So, did you fuck him?"
"Shut up," she scowled. Then, after a pause, "No."
Mal didn't respond to that; at least, not verbally. But she noted the lopsided grin on his face. And the way he leaned back on his haunches and pulled her legs up, hooking his elbows under the crooks of her knees, and then shoved his cock into her even deeper than before.
She closed her eyes and threw her head back against the mattress, baring her throat to him, as she had already bared her pale white breasts and her pretty pink pussy.
