These characters don't suffer repercussions, because their story ends. They can have casual sex without using condoms. You aren't as lucky.
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"And that is so not going to happen!" finished Tori.
They were lying by the poolside, and as it often did, the topic had come around to boys and girls.
Emily made a sound of acknowledgment, not looking at her friend. Tori was a 22-year-old natural blonde. She was lying on her belly, stretched out on a towel, sweating in the hot sun. Her tanned, bare skin bore only a calf tattoo and a cheerful red bikini.
And it wasn't a big one. The scarlet triangle decorating her butt was more of a patch.
Emily reclined on the beach chair next to her. Her pine-green bikini, more modest, was the only one she'd ever owned. This was the third time she'd ever worn it.
Emily was twenty-one, with straight dark brown hair. People who looked into her huge dark eyes thought of a waif, or an owl. When her hair fell across her face, when she looked at you up through her lashes: mischievous. Perhaps a sensuous, thick-lipped Gypsy had snuck into her dull British family line. But most of the time, she told her reflection, her features were just plain. A plain, simple girl.
She wore sunscreen. A lot of it. Emily didn't tan. Her pale skin pinked or burned. Sometimes a smattering of freckles would kiss her cheeks for a few days, if she'd been lucky and caught just the right heat of the sun. She didn't really do poolsides. She was here because Tori was her friend and this was a typical Tori afternoon.
Tori had just given her the update on the crazy boy who last week had spotted her across the bar and just wouldn't stop trying to buy her drinks. One drink was nice. In the telling, it had earned him a smile, and that, Tori explained, was her first mistake.
The rest was a grueling story of rolled eyes, texts, friends and ex-girlfriends that Emily couldn't relate to. Boys didn't buy Emily drinks. That was largely because Emily didn't go to bars. But if she did, she told herself, boys wouldn't buy her drinks.
Sometime around when he'd sent his friend over to Tori's table, which was right around the time that Emily's polite interest was growing into unhappy irritation, her attention had wandered. She'd watched the gardener.
The gardener was a large, quiet fellow, tanned and bulky. He was pushing a wheelbarrow back and forth from house to yard. Buckets of tools, then bags of something, and then he was working the earth.
While Tori talked, Emily had watched him, the tall golem of a man, stabbing the dirt with his shovel, over and over, wrestling his tool out and stamping it back in. This fascinated her, for some reason. He'd lifted the rosebush from the ground into his wheelbarrow, resting it gently on its side, babying the flowers, uncaring of the thorns.
In Tori's story, she'd just given the cold shoulder to the boy's friends as the gardener slapped the dirt off his gloves. In the story, she walked out of the bar as the wheelbarrow toted its rosebush behind the corner of the house.
A metaphor? thought Emily. She was an English major. Where did the roses go? Out of sight. Out of mind.
Tori stretched, adjusted her straps, and started a new story. Emily closed her eyes for some peace, but she still saw the sun in dazzling dark reds, while she heard her friend's very different life unfold. How long do I have out here before I burn, she wondered.
The gardener was Nick. Groundskeeper, as he said. Nick was the groundskeeper.
Nick left his muddy shoes in the garage. He stripped off his sweaty socks and his overalls. He'd been working hard on the garden since the morning, and had earned his shower and his break.
His little brother Jack had taken his wife out of the country for most of the summer. Their daughter Tori, Nick's niece, chose to stay home her first college summer.
Jack had hired his older brother to keep the place up.
Nick didn't mind. He wasn't really close with any of them, but he liked the three of them well enough. Jack and everyone else in Nick's family had had big dreams. But strangely, Nick, the first-born, had always known the unassuming life that was right for him. At 45, he was content. He didn't live in a fancy house like this one, no. When he wanted, he had a little room downstairs, but most nights he spent in his trailer.
Last night, he'd stayed out late with the guys, a good bunch of guys, and now he was out in the sun, plotting yard arrangements. It was relaxing. It paid the bills.
The hot shower left him tired. He'd just had the energy to pull on a bathrobe and collapse on his bed in his quiet downstairs room. The door hadn't been pulled all the way closed.
Emily and Tori had agreed they'd break out the beers when the sun started to go down. But that was some hours away and, Emily had explained, she burned too easily to stay out.
She slid open the downstairs patio door and padded inside. Her bare feet were cold on the stone floor, her eyes wide in the gloomy dark. Her heated flesh felt like it was steaming in the cool air.
She nosed around the downstairs bar, more out of curiosity than actual interest. She thought she might make a phone call.
Then a shape in the other room caught her eye. She laid a pink-nailed hand on the door and quietly pushed it open.
Nick lay on the bed, sound asleep. The bathrobe, untied, lay parted at his sides. He was completely naked.
His knees were at the bed's edge, his feet on the floor. His knees, comfortably apart, framed the college girl who was staring from the doorway.
Some part of Emily's mind thought fast: Tori would stay out for hours; she could hear this guy's faint snoring; she could always say she was just looking for a bottle of booze.
Her gaze held steady on Nick's soft, uncircumcised penis.
It lay to its side, across his hip. His long, hairy ball sack -- all of him was pretty hairy, it seemed -- hung low in the dark between his thighs.
Emily had seen pornography, of course. She'd led a sheltered life in her private high school, but in college, like any normal girl, she'd called up a website or two in the privacy of her bedroom.
She knew what a penis was, and how it worked. She'd never seen a real one. She'd never even seen a video of a soft one. Weren't they supposed to be smaller when they were soft? This one seemed pretty big.
She breathed open-mouthed, silently, watching. She could hear the faint sound of the distant highway, and the smooth hum of the central A/C, and Nick's open-throated hoarse breathing that could barely be called a snore.
How had she decided to step inside and push the door back ajar? Yet there she was, standing flat-footed, door behind her, hands clasped chastely in front of her bikini bottom, staring at the cock and balls of a freshly-washed man.
Genitals, came the word unbidden to her mind. But her face was reddening, she knew, not from the sun, and the giddy twists in her insides weren't because she was in science class. That was a cock.
"Touch it, Emily," she thought to herself.
Where had that come from? That didn't sound like her.
There were poets and poetesses who met like this, she thought. She was sure of it. What's-his-name, they got married. There was debauchery of some kind, she knew. The writers she admired lived life to the fullest. Surely she should do the same.
She found herself taking a step and crouching down between the grown man's legs. Her eyes were adjusting now. The drapes were closed, the light was off, but the room was actually not dark at all, it had just looked that way. Just dim.
His legs were like tree trunks. His hands seemed huge. The gardener was a big, strong guy.
The dark hair on his legs grew thicker between his thighs, and it drew a line up his belly. "Like a satyr," came to her in an inane flash. She could see, now, his ball sack dangling down, wrinkled and reddish-brown with a smattering of wiry hairs. "Gross," she thought, but there was another thought too.
Her hand hovered over his sleeping penis -- cock -- resting so innocently on its side.
Then her warm hand rested carefully on the warm penis. It was so soft. So tender and harmless. It felt like a newborn puppy.
She looked up for a moment. Nick hadn't moved. When she realized she was touching her first penis, something adjusted inside her. And when it occurred to her that she was a college girl holding on to a grown man's dick -- Tori's uncle ("old enough to be..." came to her) -- well that made her feel something too.
It wasn't a bad feeling.
Some gentle squeezes. The thing's skin was loose. The flesh was soft and pliable. So this was what they were like.
Could she make it hard? she wondered. She wrapped her whole hand over it in a loose fist and slowly, like she'd seen in videos, she pulled up and down.
