grown-up. I'm nervous. What if I can't do the work? What if I'm not smart enough?"
I looked around us; we were in an empty hallway off of which opened only classrooms that nobody, except a guy showing his freshman sister her way around, would visit on a Sunday afternoon before classes had even started. So I stopped in my tracks. I reached around and turned her toward me as I turned toward her. I took her by the chin and raised her worried face to look up at me as I smiled down at her. I kissed her gently, quickly, on the lips.
"Mindy, if you can't do the work, there are a
lot
of other people here who are going to flunk out with you. Most of them, in fact." I smiled down at her and went on, "I know you think I'm smarter than you, because you told me so. But whether I am or not, you're still the smartest person I know, and I don't have any doubt that you'll do well."
"I don't knowâŚ" She really was worried.
"I have faith in you, Little Sister. If you don't have any in yourself, use mine. I've got enough for both of us." I grinned at her, hugged her, and gave her a real kissâa lover's kiss. She returned it, measure for measure.
"You're really good for me, Charlie. You really do believe in me, don't you?" she said when we broke. She was smiling, now.
"I do."
"Then I guess I have to, too."
"You'd better, or I'll have to spank you."
"Hmmm!" She smiled slyly. "I remember what happened last time you spanked me. Now I don't know if I want to believe or not!"
I smiled back at her, and released her from my arms. As we resumed our trip down the hall toward the outside door, I gave her a swat on the assâI made sure that it stung a little.
"Bonehead!" she said, still smiling, and swatted me back. The moment of self-doubt had passed.
We walked on.
"Big Brother and Little Sister!" I recited.
"Best friends and lovers!" Her reply was joyful, enthusiastic.
"Now and always!" We squeezed each other as we sang it together.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It was still early afternoon when we'd finished finding her classrooms, and we had several hours to kill. We didn't want to return to my house, because we didn't care to get drafted into helping other folks move in. So we spent those hours exploring the campus and the parts of town surrounding it. I showed her where there was a little strip mall whose businesses included a drugstore, a hardware store, and a laundromat. We walked the three-quarter-mile distance from that mall to the town's main business district, where we found a coffee shop and sat awhile over coffee.
Once we'd gotten a few blocks from the campus, it was very unlikely that we would encounter people who might know us, or come to know us. We felt liberatedâas though we could behave more like lovers than like siblings, and we enjoyed that. After our coffee, we started back. About halfway to the campus, we made a side trip to a town park, which centered on a little lake. I hadn't paid much attention to it before, but that day, with the woman I loved on my arm, it called to me.
A park bench caught our attention. It overlooked the water, and trees and bushes screened it from the path that circled the lake. We spent a couple of hours lounging on that benchâour bodies gently touching, my arm around her, her hand resting lovingly on my thigh. These were small intimacies, to be sure, but they were lovers' intimacies, and it would be dangerous for us to share them freely on the campus. After a week apart, we were hungry for the other's touch. It was almost as if each of us needed reassurance that the other was real.
It may sound as though we had a boring afternoon, but we didn't. It was a happy interlude that punctuated a week of transition between the lives we had shared at home and those we would share at college. We were delighted at being together again, at sharing our time with each other, at caressing each other with our voices, with our eyes, with our hands. There is no doubt that our sexual passion for each other underlay those caresses, for it is inconceivable that either of us would have behaved so with someone for whom we had no such passion. But sex was not, that afternoon, the point. We were taking our first steps toward learning that there are other ways than the sexual to express what we felt for each other, and that those ways are important, too
But all good things come to an end, and so it was with that late summer afternoon. There was, not far from the park, a Burger Chefâknown on the campus as "Burger Cheapie," and our stomachs eventually drove us there late that afternoon for a burger-and-fries supper. We were early enough to miss most of the crowd from campus, but a few students were there for their suppers, too. Some of the faces were familiar, but I didn't know anyone.
After supper, we strolled back to my house. On the way, I showed her some important landmarks. About a block to our right as we stepped out of Burger Cheapie, and farther downtown from campus was Sarge's, a bar whose employees didn't much care about your age if they knew youâor if one of their established customers vouched for you. We turned left, toward campus, and without crossing the street began walking. Across the street from us, we soon passed the Kroger supermarketâthe name always to be pronounced with a soft "g" (and spelled "K-r-o-j-e-r" when written out) because for six months the previous year the round body of the "g" in the lighted sign at the entrance to the parking lot had been burnt-out, converting that letter to a "j."
Shortly, on our side of the street, came the house known to everyone on the campus as "The Dog House" on account of an ill-tempered Doberman who lived behind a six-foot chain link fence and gave every passerby a good, sometimes frightening, piece of his mind. Across the street and a few blocks short of our destination, was Arlene's, the greasy spoon where we had eaten breakfast with Mom and Dad before going to the College President's address. Arlene was as famous for her excellent pies as she was infamous for her awful, greasy home-fried potatoes.
A block beyond Arlene's, and on our side of the street, was "The Bird House"âso called because the front yard sported, on a ten-foot pole, a large birdhouse that had been made and painted in the image of the house itself. Finally, on the other side of the street and about a block short of my house was a house with an unkempt yard. Known as "The Place," it had been unoccupied for a decade at least; and its overgrown shrubs had been well watered by many academic generations of men (and, no doubt, occasional women) who'd decided their bladders wouldn't make it home after an evening's hard work at Sarge's.
When we arrived at the house, I introduced my apartment-mate, George, to Mindy. Frank, and Earl Abbotâthe other man who was going to live downstairs that yearâwere there, too. So I introduced them to her as well. I could see that all three of those men approved of Mindy's nice little bodyâconfirming, once again, my own estimate of my good taste.
Earl constituted no immediate threat; he was engaged to a senior woman. George and Frank, on the other hand, were unattached. They couldn't drool over my little sister under the watchful eye of her big brother, because that would violate the Fundamental Code of Manly Behavior. But I could see that their salivary glands were active and that it was only because of great effort on their parts that nothing was escaping to run down their chins. Watching the two of them trying to upstage each other for her attention amounted to a comic sideshowâknowing as I did that neither of them had a snowball's chance in Hell.
After a bit, I noticed that Mindy had altered her behavior in response to the attention they were giving her. She held her shoulders back a little more than usual, making her boobs more prominent. (And I did not miss the fact that her nipples, having hardened, made themselves apparent through the opaque fabric of her shirt.) She paid rapt attention when either of them spoke. She laughed engagingly at all of their rotten jokesâincluding the ones that would've gotten me punched. And her movements had become a little slinkier than I was used to. Their antics had turned her on, and, in return, my little minx was stoking their fires! (Not to mention mineâas I watched all of this byplay, I was aware of some commotion in my Levis.)
