Her legs, as smooth and white as shaving cream, shine in the gloom of the bedroom. Nice legs. Like Candice’s, only fuller ... Shit, I’m getting a hard-on! Quickly, he steps backwards, away from the bed. Her eyes flutter open a little.
“Thanks,” she whispers. “Sorry about this.”
“Don’t apologize.” He fidgets, rams his hands into his pockets. “Look, you want me to get you something? Aspirin maybe?”
“That’d be great. Bathroom cupboard, behind the mirror.”
“You want the light on in here?”
“No, definitely not. Thank you.”
He nods, she closes her eyes again, and he beats a hasty retreat out of the room.
Is he losing his mind, giving the once-over to someone his mom’s age? Not that Karen looks as ancient as his old lady — fact is, Karen and Candice look like sisters. Only Karen weighs more, looks like the older sister, the experienced one. The one who really knows what to do in bed .
“Fuck,” he mutters, shoving open a door and searching for the bathroom. He realizes his mistake and starts to back out. Then stops. “Candice’s room,” he whispers, shooting a look over his shoulder down the hall. Of course, no one is there. His heart beats a little harder, and very carefully he pushes the door all the way open and steps inside.
Posters of movie stars and rock bands cover blue-flowered wallpaper. On top of a white dresser a stack of Cosmopolitan magazines competes for space with a regiment of lipsticks. Dirty laundry overflows from a teddy-bear-shaped wicker basket. Ahead of him an unmade bed still holds the imprint of where Candice slept. A black rug with a clown on it sits in the middle of the floor.
Like the needle of a compass swinging north, Egret veers in the direction of the bed.
He can smell her, that heady scent of lemon shampoo, blue jeans, and lilac deodorant. The urge to lie on the bed and jack off overwhelms him.
Quickly, he diverts his gaze from the rumpled bedsheets. His eyes fall instead on the teddy-bear laundry basket. Specifically, on a pair of panties draped over its left eye like a pirate’s patch. Black lace panties.
A shiver ripples through him.
There, right in front of him, is evidence of Candice’s womanhood. It is nature’s statement that she is ready for him. And he wants her, is he ever ready for her. Stiffer than a damn crowbar.
He throws another look over his shoulder. What he wouldn’t give if the woman lying in the bedroom next door was Candice, Candice waiting for him, Candice all thigh-slippery with expectation .
“But it’s her mother and she’s waiting for you to get her some aspirin, so get your ass out of here,” he chides himself.
Yet he can’t. He can’t leave those panties there. Without thinking he steps forward, snatches them off the teddy-bear basket, and stuffs them in his pocket. For a moment he stares at the wicker bear, afraid its unwavering eyes are warning him to put the panties back. His heart bongs against his larynx.
“Forget it, buddy,” he whispers to the bear. “They’re mine now.” He turns and leaves the room.
More than once as he rummages through the bathroom cupboard for a bottle of aspirin, his hand dives into his pocket and he fingers the black lace cowering there. He sniffs his fingers and swallows against the saliva that springs into his mouth from the iron-ammonia smell of her crotch. Totally turned on and partially revolted, he suppresses the urge to lick his fingertips.
Never once does he even notice the microwave by the toilet.
Candice’s mother is still stretched out motionless on her bed when he returns to the darkness of her room. He stands for a moment in the doorway, looking at her legs exposed almost to the thigh, at her full hips, her big tits, her smooth neck.
He stumbles forward, slopping water from the plastic bathroom cup over his sneakers.
“Here’s your aspirin, Mrs. — Karen. I brought the whole bottle. I didn’t know how much you wanted. And water, I brought you some water.”
She shifts a little, and the rustle of her skin against the bedsheets makes him break out in gooseflesh. He keeps his eyes firmly averted, keeps talking.
“I’ll just open it up for you, okay? Then I’d better get going. My old man’ll wonder where I am. Look, I’m putting it down on this table here, right by your elbow. That okay with you?”
“Thank you, yes.”
He backs away, looking everywhere but at her. “You going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Andy should be home soon. I’ll be fine.”
“Good. Well, then, guess I’ll be going.”
“Yes. Thank you, Egret. Sorry about ... all this.”
“No problem.”
He hesitates for a moment, then turns and flees.
Chapter Five
Panic descends on Andy. More than anything else — well, as much as any of his other phobias — Andy is terrified that his parents will divorce. Plenty of kids in his class have two sets of parents, and they wear that shameful brand with as much dignity as nine-year-olds can muster. Kids desperately rely on their parents for order, for conformity, for equilibrium — everyone knows that; divorce screams the opposite.
It is an unwritten rule that the divorce of one’s parents should never be targeted during a schoolyard attack, but in Andy’s case, he knows things would be different. Kids like to pick on him, even now in the new school where, theoretically, they have no reason to think of him as a wimp, save for his meatless limbs, pearly skin, and telescope glasses.
If his parents divorce, his life will become sheer hell. A lonely hell at that. His father is his only friend. And his mother...he chokes back tears as he cleans his mother’s vomit off the kitchen floor.
To Andy, his mom is a red-haired Marilyn Monroe, an awesome alabaster-skinned vixen. When he first heard the word vixen, he imagined a kind of industrious ermine, but a Concise Oxford English Dictionary set him clear on that misconception a year ago. Now that he knows the real definition of vixen — a female fox — he still feels his mother lives up to the word. The term alabaster-skinned dignifies the appellation, gives it a royalness that erases all negative meaning. In his eyes, beyond a doubt, his mother is an alabaster-skinned vixen.
And he knows, with equal conviction and a great deal of fearful guilt, that his father somehow falls short of being an adequate vixen keeper.
So the stark evidence that his mother has been entertaining people this afternoon — a tea tray with two dirty cups on it, and two more cups cradling new tea bags awaiting on the counter — accompanied with the inexplicable vomit on the floor, fallen electric kettle, and his mom’s damp dress, sends tears of dread racing to clog Andy’s sinuses.
Sure, she said she must have caught the flu. Sure, she said she heard Dilly knock the kettle off the counter while she was lying in bed. But what about the four cups, the pulled-out chairs? And most damning of all — for it guaranteed that her guests weren’t female friends — what about her whispered request to refrain from mentioning any of this to his father?
So Andy not only clears up the vomit while his mother painstakingly hauls herself out of bed to prepare dinner, but he also cleans and puts away the teacups, even washes the unused ones, feeling they have, in some way, been sullied. His guilt at concealing this evidence and agreeing to withhold this information from his father makes him miserable. His mother seems