Rosie O'Dell

by Bill Rowe

  They had left the reception as soon as they decently could, it was so boring, Mom said, strolling into the living room. Rosie and I were all reorganized by then, sitting in separate chairs, reading textbooks. Mom stood over by the couch and said, “Still studying? You guys are not overdoing it, are you? Want some milk and cookies?”

  As she spoke, my eyes were drawn up to the bowl around the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a movement there. At first, I thought it was a moth or fly, but then I saw that it was a viscid, gooey substance that was oozing from the top of the bowl, down the side and now dangling and threatening to let go. A gob of my semen was about to drop onto Mom’s head. The explosive ejection caused by the novel excitement of the fellatio experience, plus Rosie’s tight grip on the gun barrel, must have combined to propel it the eight feet to the top of the bowl. I glanced at Rosie. Her face was in the direction of Mom, but her eyes were slued diagonally up in horrified fascination. Simultaneously, we leapt to our feet, practically shouting our praise for the idea of milk and cookies. Startled, Mom stepped back. The stretching dribble looked like it would now land on her nose. “Heavens, I didn’t realize you were that hungry,” she said, “or I would have made you a little snack before we left.” She followed us out. Over my shoulder I saw the stretching thread above shrink to a pearl as it fell to the carpet inches behind Mom’s back.

  “Oh, I forgot something,” I said, going back in to deftly swipe up the small pearl, gleaming against the blue carpet, with my tissue. Little flecks of tissue were clear in the dark spot. I rubbed the spot with my foot.

  “What’s going on?” asked Dad at the door.

  Managing to keep myself from soiling my underwear, I said instantly, “I killed a spider on the carpet.”

  “I hope you weren’t grinding it in with your foot. Your mother will go bananas. Let me see.”

  “Dad, for the love of God,” I barked. “I got it, okay.” I held up the tissue with the semen inside the fold.

  “All right, my son, all right. Take it easy.” He went into his den.

  Out at the kitchen table, Rosie and I had to keep our eyes off each other until Mom left to go upstairs. Then we alternated between silent laughter that shook our bodies and stares of stark, disbelieving terror at our narrow escape.

  “If we tried a million times to shoot that up there on the light bowl like that,” I said, “we’d never be able to do it again. And then Mom coming in and standing right under it at exactly the wrong instant. The chances of that!”

  “It was all too unlikely to be a coincidence. And then it misses her by a split second and a couple of inches. Honest to God, Tom, the entire universe has to be under the control of an evil jokester. The stuff that can happen would scare you to death.”

  Two days later at school, Rosie came up behind me at my locker and whispered, “There’s a meeting of the medical association tonight, Mom will be upstairs, and I need help with my assignment, bad.”

  “You poor little thing,” I said. “I’ll come and lend a hand.”

  At eight o’clock that evening, Rosie and I were sitting on the couch in her entertainment room with our pants down around our knees caressing each other. “Would you mind,” I asked, “if I kissed your… ah?”

  “My what?” she said, taking hold of my head and pushing my face down until my lips and nose were against her silky pubic hair. “Oh, you mean my chummy-thing. That’s what Gram called it one time when I had a little rash: ‘This salve will be good for your chummy-thing.’ First, though, let me nip into the bathroom for a sec.” She tugged up her jeans and walked across the room, looking back at my erection. “Hold that thought,” she said.

  Sitting there, I heard something upstairs. Was Rothesay home early? I yanked my pants up and crept out of the room and stood by the stairs. The refrigerator door slammed.

  From inside the entertainment room, Rosie said, “That’s just Mom getting her juice out of the fridge. You can set your watch by when she does that every night.”

  I listened for a moment to make sure and heard a shuffling in the hall up there heading towards the stairs to the top floor. When I came back in, Rosie was slumped back on the sofa with her feet outstretched and her legs wide open. Her jeans were on the floor and her panties around one ankle. Both hands were between her legs and she was holding her labia open with her fingers. I nearly fainted. She said nothing, didn’t move, and her eyes were closed. When I got down on my knees to kiss her there, looking up at her face, her eyes sprang open as if she had just come out of a trance and she raised her knees high and wide without a word. I got an excellent and galvanizing look at her pink little anus. My kiss was a prolonged one, partly because she placed her hands on the back of my head and pressed hard. Sometimes I felt her feet pushing down on my back with force while she thrust her crotch against my mouth and tongue half a dozen times in a row. Not that I was about to complain, but I might have taken a couple of breathers during those ten minutes of bliss if the skilful coordination of her hands, feet, and crotch had not determined otherwise. When she loosened her grips and I was able to turn my head and lay it on her pelvis, she said, smoothing down my hair, “I kind of had an inkling, but I never really knew, that life could be so good.”

  I moved up beside her and she kissed my bruised and still damp lips. I moved her hand down to my straining penis and said, “Rosie, can I put it in?”

  “I’d love you to,” she said, “but we can’t risk it tonight with someone else in the house. He and Mom visit Pagan at school every term, and they were talking about going up in a week or so. I’ll be sleeping at Suzy’s, but other than that you and I will have this house entirely to ourselves for a week. I’ll get protection at Planned Parenthood so I don’t get preggers.”

  Preggers? It took me a moment to figure it out. Oh, pregnant. “Can you get safes from them when you’re only fourteen?”

  “Suzy knows someone there. She used to volunteer there till Child Welfare stopped her. Too young.” After a minute of quiet, during which Rosie gently caressed my cock and balls, she said, “Now. I’m going to do the same for you as you did for me.”

  “You’re some fair and square.”

  “Count on it, crumpet.” Hand tight around the shaft, and mouth over the top, she pulled and sucked until I was about to come. When I went to withdraw from her mouth in anticipation, she said quickly, “Leave it in, leave it in,” and clamped her lips back on.

  Halfway through my ejaculation, she pulled her head away and put her hand over the top. “Aaagh,” she said when it was over. “That tastes awful. I’m not doing that again.” We both shuddered with laughter.

  “Rosie, are you in there?” Jesus Christ, it was her mother on the staircase outside.

  Rosie raised her head with my semen still on her lips. “Yes, Mother. What? What are you creeping about the house for?” Quietly, we pulled up our pants and she wiped her mouth and chin and hands with tissues.

  “Are you all right?” asked her mother.

  “Yes, I’m all right. What do you want?”

  “Is Heathcliff in there with you?”

  Rosie kept her eyes off me. “God, Mother, no. He’s at a meeting, isn’t he?”

  “Oh yes. That’s what he said, wasn’t it? But I thought I heard—I was afraid he… Okay then, good night.”

  “Good night, Mother, good night.”

  Rosie got up abruptly and strode over to the bathroom. When she came out thirty seconds later, she was unsmiling and still abrupt. “I’d better make sure she gets in bed all right. See you in school tomorrow. The front door locks itself when you go out.” Within one minute, she’d gone from hot to icy. She went through the door and jogged up the stairs.

  THE NEXT WEEK ROSIE’S mind was preoccupied by the investigation in the school board office into the gym teacher’s “racist” remark regarding her backside. The teachers’ association had put in an immediate grievance against his suspension, and the board agreed to fast-track it to resolve it one way or the
other as soon as possible. The teacher was popular among students and they considered him competent in an agreeably down-to-earth way. They mimicked the instructions he gave at the beginning of the year to every new team: “You ask me, How do you play basketball? And I say unto you, ‘You take the darn ball and you dribble down the darn court and you pass it to your teammates and you put the ball in the darn basket. Now go out there and darn-well do it.’”

  Rosie had already told the principal that this whole foofaraw was an example of his occasionally foolish jock-talk, which nobody minded. While she could see how some might view his remark as a racist stereotype from the old days that should be avoided, she didn’t think he meant it as a negative comment against a race but as a simple recognition of one of the reasons why, physically, some African-Americans were such tremendous athletes. Hence, she did not feel insulted by the remark because, in fact, it was high praise. For someone to take it as demeaning, such a person would have to be harbouring a negative racist notion of the physical characteristic described by the coach. And who would be silly enough to harbour that notion?

  One of Rosie’s best friends on the basketball team was a Native Canadian who’d come here a couple of years ago from Manitoba with her structural engineer father and her anthropologist mother. Her name was Nancy Toogood. There was fear at the board level that the aboriginal girl, the only “visible minority” present at the time, might have been specifically insulted by the coach’s remark. Rosie told me that, in response to questions in the principal’s office, Nancy Toogood had said that, while she realized that all “coloured” people looked alike to the powers that be, or else she wouldn’t have been singled out and dragged in here, the coach was actually referring to athletic black girls, “not Native American red-skin girls.” Now, Nancy continued, if the coach had said that Rosie was “flat-assed like an Indian maiden,” then, as an aboriginal, she would have considered that to be a stereotypical racist remark because, as she hoped it was plain to see, she too was rather “high-assed like a coloured girl” and very proud of it.

  As a result of the reaction of Rosie and her friend, the board withdrew the disciplinary suspension and offered to replace it with a letter of reprimand in the coach’s file plus an order that he never again use the inappropriate terms “ass” or “coloured girl” in the future. The lawyer for the coach’s teachers’ association consented to the order but protested against the reprimand, even though the coach himself said he would have been more than happy with it, and Rosie O’Dell and Nancy Toogood were called to the meeting at the board office.

  They both repeated what they said to the principal, but the overzealous young lawyer for the teachers’ association then asked Rosie, “Ms. O’Dell, you appear to be very fit and in excellent condition as a female athlete. Would you agree that this fact might cause you, naturally and understandably, to flaunt your anatomy somewhat in the gym and perhaps, equally understandably, provoke a comment such as the one attributed to your coach, the grievor?”

  Rosie replied, “I wouldn’t say I flaunt my anatomy in the gym or anywhere else as much as you just flaunted your obnoxious stupidity. Sir, I am not responsible for my human anatomy. My DNA is responsible for that, and that is so no matter how much a certain type of perverted male attitude may try to make me personally responsible for some disgusting, even criminal, reaction by some man like yourself to my normal use of my natural female body.”

  Even the coach got the drift of this and bawled out, “Rosie never flaunted anything at me, top or bottom. She goes out on the court and plays darn super basketball just like one of those… ah, American girls, and that’s all I was talking about.”

  The young lawyer retreated in disarray after his one question and caucused with the coach and the association rep and returned with his acquiescence to the reprimand. On the way out of the board office, the coach said, “Thank you for your attitude to all this, Rosie. My wife was worried sick. I could hug and kiss you and Nancy to death.”

  “Careful who you hug and kiss to death, now, Coach,” said Rosie. “You don’t want to be suspended again.” They had a good laugh.

  And laugh Rosie and Nancy Toogood did together, as well. I saw them strutting their striking natural anatomies along the corridor in school the next day, their heads close together, repeating things to each other and practically bending over in peals of laughter at what they had said to the gobsmacked powers that be. God, how much did I love my beautiful, brilliant, and funny Rosie O’Dell. And bad. Oh, she was bad, every bit as bad as I wanted her to be.

  I CONFIRMED THAT HE next Saturday afternoon. Rothesay and Nina had flown to Ontario that morning to visit Pagan. They weren’t flying back till Tuesday night. Nina had made arrangements as usual with Suzy Martin’s mother for Rosie to sleep at Suzy’s house, under close parental and professional supervision. Mrs. Martin was soon to graduate as a social worker. Naturally, Rosie had a key to her own house and would need to go there frequently for clothes and toiletries and whatnot.

  The whatnot was where I came in. We weren’t in her house ten minutes before we carried our Coke floats up to her bedroom and took off our clothes. Then we climbed into bed in the bright broad daylight and embraced. It was the first time we had been entirely naked together, without scraps of clothes hanging off one or other of our limbs, and our first time in a bed. Rosie pulled the sheet up over us and we snuggled under it. “Oh God, this is so great,” she said, pressing herself hard against me and moving a leg over my hip. Then she put her hand down and grasped my penis, throwing the sheet off us and looking down at it. “That is a very beautiful part of you,” she said.

  “You too,” I said, reaching for her from behind, between her buttocks, “absolutely beautiful.”

  “Just feel in there,” she said opening her thighs wider. Between them it felt soaking wet. She rolled away from me and opened the drawer in her bedside table. She took out a diary-like book with a lock, unhasped it, and removed from the pages a circle of tinsel.

  “I see Suzy came through,” I said.

  “Huh?” said Rosie, putting the book on the table. As she closed it I saw several other circles on its pages. This girl was great. Long-term planning. “Oh. You mean the condom. Yes.” She passed it to me with a sweet sheepish smile. “Let’s see if we can make it work.”

  I’d put one of these on before. A year or so ago, Brent had stolen a French safe from his father and mother’s bedroom and brought it to me so that we could practise, and be ready for any day now when called upon to don one in earnest. Brent had opened it and, with just the thought of putting on a safe giving us erections, we took turns rolling it on and rolling it off.

  I took Rosie’s condom with great confidence. But what the hell did they have it covered with? I could not tear the wrapper no matter what I did. I got so frustrated I felt my penis softening. Rosie looked amused as she reached out and said, “Let me have a look. Oh, now I see your problem.” She took the slightly serrated edge between thumbs and forefingers and gave the wrapper a little tear and passed it back to me for the coup de grâce. I removed the condom, saw that I had gone flaccid, and panicked. Rosie gently pushed me onto my back, took my penis in her mouth until it was hard again, and played with it until I came. Then she said, “How long do you estimate before you reload? I’m thinking, knowing you, five minutes.”

  She was right. The good old days of youth. Within her time frame I was up and ready again, all anxiety having left me. With the condom on, I touched and fondled her. But now between her legs, for the first time since I’d become acquainted with the region, she was as dry as a bone. “Oh for the love of… ,” she muttered, touching herself down there with her fingers, “the trials and tribulations of a young woman’s passion. No wonder Juliet killed herself.”

  “Don’t feel too bad. Romeo killed himself too.”

  “That’s something, I suppose.” She hopped out of the bed and walked out the door, smiling over her shoulder. “Don’t go away. I’ll rustle something up out
here.” It was the first time I’d seen the back of her body entirely naked from top to toe at a distance. It came to me that I was dreaming. Reality could not be this good. She came in again carrying a tube of something. Her front coming through the door brought on the same sensation of fantasy.

  “Are you real?” I asked. “You are too beautiful.”

  “I think I’m real, my lovey, and more than just a cute ornament with the help of this, I hope.”

  “What’s that?”

  “K-Y Jelly. It’s supposed to be a good lubricant. It’s water soluble, so it doesn’t stick to the vaginal walls like petroleum jelly does.”

  “Christ, how do you know all that?”

  “I read about the lubrication stuff in a book the grown-ups had hidden away in their bedroom, plus there’s info on the label. I found this a couple of months ago in their room half gone, so it must work. Let’s give it a go, shall we? I’ll apply it to you if you apply it to me.”

  “Can we go natural first? We’ll keep that in reserve. I’ll do unto you what you did unto me.”

  “You can do unto me whatever you like,” she said. “I am yours to do with as you wish.” I gently pushed her back and applied my lips and tongue to her for five minutes. When she drew her knees up and opened them wide, dripping with my saliva and her own fluids, I moved my body between them. “Let me know if it hurts,” I said, “and I’ll stop and use the stuff.” I had exchanged enough knowledge with the boys to know all about that first-time trauma, the taking of the cherry.

  “What?” She looked up at me. “Oh.” She kissed me. “No, it won’t hurt. That’s long gone. I’ve been using tampons for two years.”

  I can still remember, over thirty years later, the physical and mental feeling of slipping my penis in. But my greatest memory is her face—the way she gradually tilted her chin back so that the top of her head was practically touching the bed—and her knees she pulled so far back she could rest the soles of her feet on my shoulders. And for the first time in our intimacy there was no danger of being heard or of someone coming in on us. As a result Rosie was unrestrained. Approaching her orgasm she said, “We’ll come back here again tomorrow. We’ll come back tomorrow and do this again…” over and over until her words became a jumble of incomprehensible mutterings, tiny shrieks, and oh oh ohs. I must say, it was a wonderful experience.