nipple rough in my mouth, and she still had her panties on but only sort of, they were all pushed and bunched to one side and I had first one finger in her and hen two fingers, Chuck Berry singing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and The Royal Teens singing ‘Short Shorts,’ and her hand was inside my fly, fingers pulling at the elastic of my own short-shorts, and I could smell her, the perfume on her neck and the sweat on her temples just below where her hair started, and I could hear her, hear the live pulse of her breath, wordless whispers in my mouth as we kissed, all of this with the front seat of my car pushed back as far as it would go, me not thinking of flunked prelims or the war in Vietnam or LBJ wearing a lei or Hearts or anything, only wanting her, wanting her right here and right now, and then suddenly she was straightening up and straightening me up, both hands planted on my chest, splayed fingers pushing me back toward the steering wheel. I moved toward her again, slipping one of my own hands up her thigh, and she said ‘Pete, no\’ in a sharp voice and closed her legs, the knees coming together loud enough so I could hear the sound they made, that locking sound that means you’re done making out, like it or not. I didn’t like it but I stopped.
I leaned my head back against the fogged-up window on the driver’s side, breathing hard.
My cock was an iron bar stuffed down the front of my underwear, so hard it hurt. That would go away soon enough — no harden lasts forever, I think Benjamin Disraeli said that — but even after the erection’s gone, the blue balls linger on. It’s just a fact of guy life.
We had left the movie — some really terrible good-ole-boy thang with Burt Reynolds in it
— early and had come back to the Steam Plant parking lot with the same thing on our minds .
. . or so I’d hoped. I guess it was the same thing, except I had been hoping for a little more of it than I’d gotten.
Carol had pulled the sides of her sweater together but her bra still hung over the back of the seat and she looked madly desirable with her breasts trying to tumble out through the gap and half an areola visible in the dim light. She had her purse open and was fumbling her cigarettes out with shaky hands.
‘Whooo,’ she said. Her voice was as shaky as her hands. ‘I mean holy cow.’
‘You look like Brigitte Bardot with your sweater open like that,’ I told her.
She looked up, surprised and — I thought — pleased. ‘Do you really think so? Or is it just the blond hair?’
‘The hair? Shit, no. Mostly it’s . . . ‘ I gestured toward her front. She looked down at herself and laughed. She didn’t do the buttons, though, or try to pull the sides any more closely together. I’m not sure she could have, anyway — as I remember, that sweater was a wonderfully tight fit.
‘There was a theater up the street from us when I was a kid, the Asher Empire. It’s torn down now, but when we were kids — Bobby and Sully-John and me — it seemed they were always showing her pictures. I think that one of them, And God Created Woman, must have played there for about a thousand years.’
I burst out laughing and took my own cigarettes off the dashboard. ‘That was always the third feature at the Gates Falls Drive -in on Friday and Saturday nights.’
‘Did you ever see it?’
‘Are you kidding? I wasn’t even allowed to go to the drive-in unless it was a Disney double feature. I think I must have seen Tonka with Sal Mineo at least seven times. But I remember the previews. Brigitte in her towel.’
‘I’m not coming back to school,’ she said, and lit her cigarette. She spoke so calmly that at first I thought we were still talking about old movies, or midnight in Calcutta, or whatever it took to persuade our bodies that it was time to go back to sleep, the action was over. Then it clicked in my head.