by Bill Rowe
Then, the English Literature teacher called for auditions for the play he wanted to present to the school that fall: Macbeth. Rosie decided she would try out for the part of either Lady Macbeth or one of the Weird Sisters. She had absolutely no interest whatsoever, she told me, in the role of the pathetic victim, Lady Macduff, who was murdered with her children by Macbeth’s thugs. The speech she read was early in the play when Lady Macbeth was reproaching her husband for getting cold feet about going ahead with his own original idea of killing the king. Up there on the stage, she began with, “What beast was’t then that made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man…” and so on down to the lines she ended with: “I have given suck, and know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.” The hair actually moved on my scalp. The auditorium of scattered students and a couple of teachers went completely still and silent and stayed frozen for thirty seconds, and then broke out in applause.
The next day her reading was the talk of the school. In the corridors you heard male students say the word “nipple” a lot. There was a fair amount of smirking. The buzz, together with the news that Rosie had been chosen for the part, guaranteed on the day of production a full house of students whose familiarity till then with the sounds “shake” and “speare” had been limited to obscene boasts. Sadly for the expectant lads, the principal secretly decided that when the night arrived to present the play to the students and parents, he would blue-pencil the “I have given suck…” lines out of Lady Macbeth’s speech as too prone to scandalize mothers and fathers and possibly lead to civil unrest in the male student body.
Meanwhile, I had snared the role of the nastiest of the three murderers. Suzy, who was volunteering with the production, protested in my presence to Rosie: “Sure, Tom looks way too nice to be a murderer.” Rosie replied, “Yeah, I know. But, Suzy, I would think that the secret to being a successful murderer is not to look like you’re a murderer.” That sounded amusing at the time.
A few days later, the afternoon of our first full read-through rehearsal, we were all in the wings studying our lines. Rosie plopped herself down on the floor on her stomach to peruse her part. Now I already appreciated the intensely comely contours of Rosie’s bum whenever she was standing around in her jeans. But her lying prone on the floor like that was a quantum leap in quality. The hard boards that her hips and thighs were resting on were moulding and thrusting her buttocks up to a degree of absolute magnificence. I even saw our director, the English Literature teacher, stealing glances at her. Studying Rosie more than my lines, I affirmed silently that while those breasts in the T-shirt grazing the floor were absolutely delectable in and of themselves, I owed it to myself and to her to start becoming better acquainted with neglected parts of my true love’s lower anatomy.
After the reading, I was standing at my locker when the drama director went by with his good buddy the gym teacher. They were gabbing conspiratorially and grinning from ear to ear. Call me paranoid, but I had the definite feeling they were discussing Rosie’s arse. The proof? It was the very next day at basketball, the sport Rosie had chosen to concentrate on for cross-training with her tennis, that the gym teacher, while congratulating her on the height of her jumps, famously proclaimed before all the reason Rosie O’Dell was such good athlete: “She’s high-assed like a coloured girl.” Why the popular gym teacher would be suspended for “inappropriate sexist and racist stereotyping” pending further investigation when, after all, he’d only been stating an obvious anatomical truth, was the subject of mock debate among the boys.
A few nights later Rosie and I were “studying” together in the living room at my house. I wasn’t allowed to have girls in my bedroom now, even to do school work, Mom had said. Oh, she knew she could trust me and Rosie not to do anything improper—that wasn’t the issue—but we were no longer children and it was simply not appropriate for teenagers of the opposite sex to be alone in one another’s bedrooms together. Most of the night Mom and Dad wandered around the house between kitchen and den and upstairs, poking into the living room only once each for Mom to ask if we wanted something to eat or drink and for Dad to say he hoped he wouldn’t be disturbing us too much when he came in at nine to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Then Dad said they were going to the drugstore for a few minutes to pick up a couple of things—ten minutes max. That was a damned lie he’d designed to stop me from having a good time. I knew it took seven minutes to get there, and the same back, plus ten minutes inside, for a total of at least twenty-four minutes.
As soon as they were out the door, Rosie and I started kissing, but when I went to undo her bra, she said, “Your parents might come back and catch us.” I argued the mathematics of their trip’s timing, but she said, “No, they might come back early because they forgot something. Tomorrow night we’ll go to my place.” She settled back semi-supine on the cushion under her head, put one leg and socked foot on the sofa, with the other sole on the floor, and closed her eyes. “Do you mind if I have a little ten-minute power nap so that I can watch Monty Python? I got up too early this morning for my run. I don’t want to drop off and start snoring in front of your dad.” Rosie had mastered the art of the instant nap whenever she was tired. She could sleep on a pin, she said, and having acquired the ability to do so for a few minutes at will was the greatest gift she had ever given herself. She reached her arms out to me now, half-opened her eyes, and murmured, “Kiss me to sleep please.”
Gluing my mouth to hers, I found it too awkward in her position to put both arms around her, so I rested one hand lightly on her abdomen. Out of one eye, I noticed that the way she was lying had caused a one-inch gap between her stomach and the front of her jeans, the same jeans she’d had on at the rehearsal, and that my fingertips were very close to the open space. There was no way I could resist going on that trip. Slowly I slid my hand inside and over her panties to the warmth between her legs. I was so preoccupied by my stealth that I felt no increased desire, just exploratory suspense. Rosie’s knees spread apart a little more. But then she twitched and pushed my shoulder back and looked at my eyes. “You’re seducing me,” she disclosed.
I pulled my hand back out and said nothing. I was embarrassed and put my cheek against hers to avoid her eyes. “No,” she whispered, “don’t stop.” She took my hand and pushed it down again, but this time inside her panties. “We’ve got to listen for the car coming back.”
My fingers crept over the soft, glossy-feeling hair, entirely unlike my own wiry tuft, and made their way down around the bend. Rosie opened her legs more and moved her pelvis up to accommodate me. Her head was leaning back with her eyes closed and she was gripping my upper arm hard with one hand. My middle finger glided a little inside the soft, smooth, slippery centre of the universe. For minutes I moved my finger back and forth as she pushed with the same rhythm against it—how long I don’t know, but enough time for Mom and Dad to return from the drugstore. I was looking at Rosie’s face and neck, which had coloured to a deep pink I’d never seen there before, and I was ejaculating in my pants from the excitement, when Rosie pulled my hand out of her jeans and sat up abruptly: “Jesus Christ, they’re back.” She must have had some ears on her to catch the sound of the car in the driveway over the roar of the cataract I was hearing in my ears.
Jumping off the sofa and giggling as she caught my eye, she tucked in her shirt and headed out to the washroom off the hall. Meanwhile, feeling as if my underwear was sloshing in my pants, I ran up over the stairs to the bathroom. On the way I caught an odour, imaginary or real, of semen, and every time a particular finger on one hand approached my face as I climbed, it gave off a light musky fragrance, which, in the few seconds before I washed my hands, I grew to utterly love.
Coming back down, I heard quiet voices which sounded a lot like querulous “what the hell was going on
here” talk between Mom and Dad. Would Dad smell anything? He had phenomenal sniffers when it came to a whiff of anything he deemed negative. Would Mom wonder what was so urgent that Rosie and I both had to rush off to bathrooms at precisely the same moment just as they had come in? I went in the living room prepared to brazen it out. Rosie was already in there chatting with them. She looked completely normal, possibly a slight blush left over from the deep pink, but with her fair skin she often looked as if she was modestly blushing a little. It was one of her traits that people found charming. Now she looked at me and smiled elegantly. God knows, however, what I looked like—goofy, guilty, possibly cross-eyed, judging by the long once-over my mother was giving me—but Rosie was as calm and poised as if she had practised for such moments. “I was just telling your parents I think I will stay for the TV show,” she said, and the four of us settled down to watch an episode of Monty Python.
The next night was the best time of my life up to then. We did our schoolwork in her bedroom until about eight-thirty. There was no restriction on our using her bedroom. There didn’t seem to be any restrictions in her house on anything Rosie did. She did what she felt like doing and came and went as she wanted. Half the time, I noticed, she didn’t bother telling her mother or her stepfather where she was going or even that she was going out. When I mentioned how lenient they were with her, she replied that she’d had that battle with each of them, her clinching argument having been that she was at least as responsible in her conduct as they were in theirs. I asked her what she meant and she said, “The secret to doing anything you want to is not give anyone who thinks they have authority over you any excuse to exercise it.” We were sitting in chairs in her bedroom with her door wide open. I was going to ask how she thought her parents were irresponsible, but Rosie glanced out into the hallway, got up and came over to me, and pressed her breasts against my face, squeezing them together with her upper arms. I had whispered to her earlier how good she looked not wearing a brassiere under her shirt and she’d said it felt good too, because that new sports bra she’d worn today at basketball had nearly killed her. She jerked her thumb towards the door: “At least, that’s the story I’m giving her.”
Now I lifted my face above her breasts and said, “And your story is absolutely true. It does feel good without that sports bra in the way.”
She smiled down and pulled my head back in and kissed my hair. “So we can do exactly what we want,” she said, “and everything we want, as long as we don’t get caught and force any busybodies to feel they have to act. Which reminds me. Want to go downstairs…” She gave a couple of exaggerated winks, “and watch some television?”
On the way down, we met Rosie’s mother coming up. She was in a dressing gown and walking slowly. She seemed to function all right during the day, if a little spacy-looking, but by mid-evening like this she always looked dazed. She managed a slurred good night. Rosie had told me there were no complaints regarding her job as librarian, but because she couldn’t sleep very well at night “she might be overdoing it a little after supper with her nighty-night dope.” When I wondered if having a doctor as a husband meant someone might have too easy an access to drugs or, in fact, better control over what might otherwise be abuse, Rosie stopped and looked at me and said, “You know something, Tommy, that’s a darn good question.”
We passed Rothesay in his den as we headed for the entertainment room stairs. He looked out and waved: “About to watch a spot of telly after our scholastic toils, are we? Enjoy.” Rosie kept on going downstairs without answering while I stopped for a minute to say good evening. He was well back in his recliner listening to opera and reading The Princess Bride by William Goldman. A tall glass, half full of amber liquid, rested by his arm.
Downstairs, Rosie flicked the television on, turned to a show that looked like something two fourteen-year-olds might watch, reduced the sound no further down than medium low for realism’s sake while still allowing us to hear any sound of descent outside. “Neither of them ever comes down here,” she said, “but you never know with Mom.” She plopped down close to me on the sofa. Soon we were passionately kissing and caressing our upper bodies inside our shirts. For pants, she was wearing those loose fleecy après-workout ones with an elastic top which made it easy for me to slip my hand inside. To my shocked delight, she was wearing no panties. She unglued her lips from mine to say, “Clever, huh?” Over about the next half hour, judging by the fact that the TV show changed, we finished what we had started last night at my place, and Rosie alternately flung her knees apart and squeezed my hand tightly between her thighs, and rubbed my fingers hard into her crotch with her own hand as she climaxed. The physical intensity of her fervour, completely unfamiliar to me with anyone before this, was almost frightening—eerie too, in that not a sound came out of her. But when it was over and she whispered, “That was so great; I love you so much,” the disquiet left me, never to come back again, and I was overcome by a sensation of absolute love.
“You said you liked it when I touched you down there by accident that time,” she murmured and then sat up and looked innocently into my face. “Do you think you’d still like it if I did it on purpose?”
As my heart threatened to burst out of my chest, I put out my hand and rocked it side to side a little to indicate maybe so, maybe not, emitted a sound of uncertainty, and then said, “Well, no harm in finding out.”
“Yeah, might as well lay that to rest once and for all.” She cupped her hand over the front of my pants and moved it back and forth an inch or two. “My oh my. Note to self: preliminary indications are that he likes it. Proceed with research.” She undid my belt, leaving it loose in the buckle, and slid her fingers inside my underwear and under my penis. I was proud and excited to see the top peeping out past the top of my pants. Then she placed her other hand over the other side of my penis and held it tight between both hands. She was looking down at it intently. Her eyes were sparkling and there was a small smile of what looked like contentment on her lips. Moving her hands back and forth, she glanced at me to say something, but I thwarted her by instantly coming in her hands. She tightened her grip throughout and fell against my chest and, not being able to reach my lips because my head was thrown back, kissed me on the neck until it was over.
She sat up and looked at the door and listened for a second, and then smiling at me, gingerly pulled her hands out, full of semen. “Whoops,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
She stood and headed towards the bathroom at the end of the room, her hands cupped in front of her. Looking down at them with a happy grin on her face as if she was carrying gold coins, she said, “No, that was excellent.”
And so Rosie and I spent every spare hour we could steal alone together, usually at her house, sometimes at mine, doing an “assignment,” our code word for mutual masturbation: “Do you want to come over to my place after supper and get that history assignment done?” “Yes, I’d better. The deadline for that is soon.”
Only Brent and Suzy suspected the full truth. Cheerily, he complained to me and she complained to her that we hardly did anything together anymore. “Assignments,” Suzy laughed to Brent when the four of us were having lunch in the cafeteria one day. “Mission Impossible doesn’t have as many assignments as these two.”
My mother and father had no idea of the extent or frequency of our mischief. They probably thought that we two smart and sensible fourteen-year-olds were sneaking a bit of necking when we got together, yes, of course, that was only normal and harmless, but that we were otherwise studying. We had only one big scare with my parents, but that was enough at the time to make me consider becoming a monk.
Rosie and I were in my living room reading our textbooks. We had picked my house because Mom and Dad were going to a reception for an hour or so that night. I knew about it a couple of days beforehand, having heard them saying that neither of them wanted to go, but they had to. Before we started in, we waited our usual ten-minute margin in case of a quick return b
y parents for something forgotten. Our danger margin had proved its worth one night when Dad rushed back five minutes after leaving to get his wallet, and found us at the kitchen table having an innocent pre-debauch snack.
During our amorous probing and pulling tonight, Rosie inquired, “Is it okay with you if I kiss your penis?”
I was so moved by the question I couldn’t even come up with a witty reply. “Yes,” I said.
She got off the couch and on her knees and pulled my pants and underwear halfway down my thighs. Then, holding tight to the base with both hands, she kissed the tip three times and then pulled the shaft towards her till it was vertical and put the top into her mouth. We didn’t expect what happened next. The frequency and power of my climaxes at Rosie’s hands in past weeks had given me greater control over my ejaculations. But the look of what she was doing now, and the feel of what she was doing now, and the thought of what she was doing now, overcame all control.
“Watch out, watch out,” I screamed under my breath. She pulled her mouth off, ducked her head to one side, and squeezed my penis, hanging on for dear life, her eyes on the phenomenon. The first jet shot by her nose into the air. The next spasms I managed to cover with the tissues I now kept in my pocket for these occasions.
After a few seconds of total silence, Rosie giggled, “God, that was something.” She got up and examined the couch, and the legs of my slacks and socks, the carpet in front of the couch, and the front and back of her jeans. Then she ran her fingers through her hair and, turning around, asked if there was anything on the back of her shirt. There wasn’t. “What the heck happened to that first spurt?” she asked. I couldn’t tell her. It had vanished into thin air. But then, twenty minutes later, Mom and Dad came in the front door.