Too Close

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Do it,’ Holly urged him.

  By the time he’d moved the chair, carefully and almost silently, Holly had already pulled her sweater over her head. It was not the first time Nick had seen her in her bra – they’d been fooling around at the very edge of this for a couple of months now. Nick had meant what he’d said about thinking about it all the time. He thought about sex with Holly just about every minute of every day.

  ‘Come here,’ Holly said, softly.

  He walked towards the bed.

  ‘Take off your sweater,’ Holly said. ‘That’s good.’ He was sitting beside her now. ‘Now undo my bra.’

  Nick’s fingers were clumsy, trembling a little as he reached behind her and unhooked the flimsy cotton and lace brassiere. He had touched Holly’s breasts many times, but up until now he had only caught glimpses of them as he’d fumbled in darkness, pulling up the sweaters or blouses that had been in his way. Now, though, there they were, naked and bold, pale and soft with perky pink nipples, and Nick wanted to kiss them, to suck those nipples, to bury his face between them.

  ‘Go on,’ Holly whispered, urged. ‘Go on.’

  Once it began, there was no stopping it. The mutual nakedness was so different, so much more fantastic than all the half-blind groping around had been, and as Holly unzipped his good Christmas Day trousers, Nick needed no more urging to do the same for Holly’s skirt, and then he was dying – just dying – for more, and her pantyhose were on the floor, and then her panties, too, and her hands were dragging off his own shorts. His penis sprang free, and they lay down together, and Holly’s hands were all over him, on his chest, on his back, on his buttocks, and, oh, Jesus, that felt unbe-liev-able, and they started kissing then, such deep, glorious, wet, probing kisses, and they just got him harder and harder, and he could hear himself groaning right into her mouth.

  ‘I want you,’ Holly moaned, pulling her mouth away. ‘I want you right now . . .’

  ‘Me too.’ Nick was panting. ‘Oh, God, me too.’

  Holly opened her legs, and Nick stared down at the magical V, at what nestled between – the sweet mound of dark, curling hair – and a brand-new panic flared up inside him; for how in the name of sweet Jesus was he going to put his enormous, pulsating penis inside that scarcely visible place that he’d only played with until now with his fingers?

  ‘Come on, Nick.’ Holly’s grey eyes were huge, pleading. ‘Come on.’ She held out her arms to him. ‘Come on, I’ll help you.’

  She knew she could help him, knew the way better than he did, for hadn’t she been playing those games, practising alone in her room under the covers late at night, thrusting a finger into her hungry wetness the way she’d read in her mother’s old copy of Scruples? – and then, as she became more skilful and more avid, bunching first two and then three fingers together, pushing them as high up into herself as she could – though she’d known it wasn’t the same as the real thing would be. And now there it was, her darling Nick’s cock was right there, plump and juicy and quivering, and she just couldn’t bear to wait another second.

  ‘The condom,’ Nick said, suddenly, remembering.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Holly moaned. ‘Forget the condom.’

  ‘But it’s important.’ Frantically, Nick looked around for it. ‘We have to—’

  ‘No,’ Holly told him firmly, her voice suddenly louder, more commanding. ‘We don’t.’

  Nick looked down at her, at her pretty face, changed now with her wanting, cheeks flushed, eyes almost foxy, lips swollen, and he stopped panicking about the condom or about how he was going to find his way into her. Instinct was going to take over now, he knew it, and they did love each other, so it had to be okay, and anyway, like Holly, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, wait another second.

  Their bodies came together again, and her soft tautness beneath him was heaven on earth, and they kissed again, and he reached down with his right hand and took hold of himself and started trying to find the place, and he couldn’t at first – oh, Christ, he couldn’t find it – and then Holly’s hands were helping him, and she was opening herself further, and there it was – oh, God, oh, Jesus, here it was – and he was pushing a little, and he heard Holly gasp and give a small, soft cry of pain, and he started to pull out, afraid of hurting her—

  ‘Don’t,’ she hissed at him. ‘Don’t stop, it’s okay.’

  So he didn’t stop. He pushed again, and it was tight in there, tight and smooth and warm, and suddenly Holly made another of those weird, wonderful sounds, and it all started to change; she was moving her hips, and he was moving too, and it became impossible to differentiate the sensations on and around his penis and testicles from the feelings he was experiencing throughout his entire body.

  ‘Holly,’ he said. Just her name, nothing else, but the single word was filled with wonder and glory.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, rocking back and forth.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Nick said, knowing he was coming – any second now he was going to come right there inside her – and some vague, blurry thought about the condom came back into his mind for an instant, but he shoved it away and plunged right on—

  The sound at the door froze them both.

  Nick stared down into Holly’s face, saw his own terror mirrored in her eyes. He was still deep inside her, could feel her trembling, but he didn’t dare move a muscle.

  The sound came again.

  A kind of snuffling.

  ‘Who?’ Nick mouthed at Holly.

  She shook her head.

  Another snuffle.

  Holly started to laugh, very quietly.

  ‘What?’ Nick whispered, appalled. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the dog,’ Holly said, still laughing. ‘It’s your goddamned dog.’

  Nick listened. Half of him wanted to laugh too; half of him wanted to scream.

  ‘Matisse,’ he hissed, ‘go away.’

  The dog scratched at the door.

  ‘Get lost, Matisse,’ Nick commanded, not daring to shout.

  The dog went on scratching.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Nick moaned. ‘Matisse, will you go away.’

  The animal scratched harder, and the door rattled.

  ‘He’s not going anywhere,’ Holly said, still laughing.

  Nick groaned. Slowly, carefully, aware that he’d lost his erection, he withdrew from Holly’s body.

  ‘Oh.’ Holly grinned. ‘Poor baby.’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Nick said, collapsing beside her. ‘Damned dog.’

  Holly thought for just a second.

  ‘Canis interruptus,’ she said, with pride.

  Nick looked at her with a mixture of disgust and admiration.

  Only Holly Bourne would speak in goddamned Latin at a time like this.

  Chapter Ten

  Sex was like electricity to me at sixteen, all-enveloping, a rush a million times greater than smoking, drinking, truanting or shoplifting. I might have found those things more of a turn-on than I had wanted to admit, but at least I had always recognized that they were wrong, bad. Sex didn’t feel bad to me. Sex felt pretty damned fantastic. And it was, of course, Holly who had initiated me into the wonders of it – as it had always been Holly who had initiated me in every great or small illicit adventure – her fifteen-year-old body so soft, so tight, so uninhibited, so irresistible.

  By the time I came to the uncomfortable awareness that having sex with an underaged girl was probably more heinous a crime than stealing, it was too late. I was hooked. If I’d thought about sex with Holly a lot before we started doing it, now I thought about it every waking moment. I dreamed about her at night when I was able to sleep, lay awake in bed fantasizing about her when I was not. It was disturbing and it was wonderful. It was incredibly uncomfortable and disruptive and amazing all at the same time.

  I guess I was a kind of an addict. All the good things in my life – all the safe, normal things – began to suffer. My painting changed. Up until that time, no matter what had gone on in my world
, more than anything else it was beauty that had turned me onto painting. People told me they liked my work because it made them feel good. My sketches of them; my watercolour landscapes; my pen and ink drawings of Washington DC. But the more I screwed around with Holly or thought about screwing around, the darker and weirder my work seemed to get. Instead of painting the dreamy rural scenes I’d always liked – still liked, but couldn’t seem to manage any more – I produced a Maryland landscape that looked as if a tornado was about to rip its way out of a purplish, bruised, wild sky. Rather than portraying people in a kindly way, as I almost always had, I went abstract, presenting my poor art teacher, Miss Stein, with a picture of a man’s head split horribly in two. I didn’t like it any more than she did, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. I guess I didn’t know anything about testosterone highs in those days.

  It went on and on. Holly and I couldn’t get enough of each other. She was a natural. She read raunchy books, but I’m not sure she needed them. At fifteen years of age, Holly Bourne was managing to work out for herself the mind-blowing variety of things a boy and girl could do to each other for pleasure. And even if some kind of suppressed guilt was tarnishing the love affair a little for me, not only was I not arguing with Holly against it, but I was drinking at her well like the thirstiest of young savages.

  Until the afternoon of August 18th, 1983.

  Chapter Eleven

  The day was hot and humid. Nick and Holly had been swimming in the Bournes’ pool. Carmelita had brought them lemonade and cookies. Nick had rubbed suntan oil into Holly’s back and shoulders, and she had returned the favour. And then, hungry for one another, they had adjourned to the small, cool summerhouse behind the pool.

  ‘I want to try something new,’ Holly said.

  The by now familiar shiver of excitement stroked Nick’s spine, making him tingle. ‘What?’

  ‘The French call it soixante-neuf,’ Holly said, softly, and her eyes gleamed in the dim light. ‘Sixty-nine to you.’ Nick was not much for foreign languages.

  ‘What is it?’ Nick was avid.

  Holly came very close. He could smell chlorine and perfume and suntan oil and the other, very particular, scent that always came off Holly when they made love.

  ‘We both go down on each other at the same time,’ she whispered in his left ear. ‘It’s called sixty-nine because we’re both kind of upside-down, so that’s what we look like.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Nick said, breathing fast, already hardening. The things that Holly was willing and eager to do never ceased to astound him. He thought about them later, sometimes, and a sense of shame almost threatened to overwhelm him, but then he would start to remember the way it had actually felt, and the shame would slip away again as perfectly as something disappearing under a quicksand. ‘When?’ he asked.

  ‘Now.’

  ‘We can’t,’ Nick said. ‘Carmelita might come out again.’

  Holly shook her head and stepped away. Her hair was still wet, slicked tightly back over her scalp, and her body shone with oil. She had an idea she looked exotic and impossible to resist, like something out of a magazine. She knew by now that Nick would not resist her, and she loved the sense of power that gave her.

  ‘She won’t come out again,’ she said. ‘She likes taking a nap around this time. Her siesta.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘They’re still at work. You know that, Nick.’

  ‘I still think it’s dangerous,’ he said, half-heartedly, more than open to persuasion.

  ‘You love danger,’ Holly said, coming close again.

  ‘Not as much as you do.’

  ‘You love me,’ she said, nuzzling his neck.

  ‘Jesus, Holly.’

  ‘You want to suck me off, don’t you?’ She took his right hand and guided it down to the bottom of her swimsuit. ‘You want me to do that to you, don’t you?’

  ‘Jesus, Holly.’

  They were devouring each other so intently that they didn’t hear a single sound until Eleanor – back home early from work for the first time in months – opened the summerhouse door and walked right in on them.

  ‘Holly,’ she said, ‘go into the house.’

  That was all she said. Not another word. No screaming or cursing or making threats. Eleanor merely waited in absolute, deafening silence as Holly wrapped herself in a towel and Nick, his face aflame, scrambled to pull on his trunks. And then, very coldly and deliberately, Eleanor swung her right hand, striking him hard and noisily on his left cheek and catching his mouth with a gold ring, drawing blood.

  Holly ran out of the summerhouse, sobbing, and Nick skulked home, managing, thank Christ, to avoid Ethan and Kate who were both working in their respective studios.

  He knew, of course, that it could only be a temporary reprieve. He knew it was only a matter of time – maybe minutes, maybe an hour – before one or both of Holly’s parents came to their front door and brought the full force of their wrath down on his miserable, aching head.

  He knew, too, right there and then, that it was all over. Holly and Nick were finished. No more glorious, painful, confusing secret explosions of fire and juice. If he got horny, he was back to taking care of that on his own under the covers or in the shower.

  Though frankly, remembering Eleanor Bourne’s face, he could not imagine ever getting horny again.

  Eleanor and Richard stood together later that hot August evening before the Millers’ dead fireplace, refusing to sit, fearsomely united in their condemnation of Nick, who was upstairs in his room. Holly, too, was upstairs in the Bourne house, confined to quarters.

  ‘Your son’s very, very lucky,’ Richard Bourne, pale and shaken, told an appalled Ethan, ‘that we care too much for our daughter’s good name to have him arrested for raping a minor.’

  ‘Don’t you think that rape is overstating it somewhat?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Kate said, hotly. ‘Surely neither of you believes that Holly’s been blameless in all this?’

  ‘Holly is most certainly the victim in this situation,’ Eleanor said. ‘Holly is only fifteen years old.’ She was majestic in her quiet, dignified outrage. ‘Your son is almost seventeen. Holly is a slender, light-boned young girl. Your son is a tall, strong young man. There is,’ she said, her tone final, ‘nothing to argue about.’

  ‘There is,’ Kate pointed out, ‘if you’re going to use words like rape.’

  ‘This is a perfectly clear-cut situation.’ Richard Bourne was suddenly business-like, very much the confident lawyer. ‘Either Nick stays right away from Holly from now on, or the police will be called and charges will be brought.’

  ‘And I promise you,’ Eleanor added, ‘whatever the legal outcome, none of your family would ever recover from that scandal.’

  ‘Please,’ Kate appealed, shocked. ‘Can’t we try to—’

  ‘Facts are facts, Kate,’ Richard cut her short. ‘I’d say, once again, that Nick is getting off very lightly.’

  ‘He ought,’ Eleanor said, ‘to be whipped.’

  ‘He certainly ought,’ Richard added, ‘to be in court.’

  ‘We’re so very sorry,’ Ethan told them, taking Kate’s hand and squeezing it tightly for moral support. ‘You must know – you have to know – that we’re just as horrified as you.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘We will, of course,’ Richard pointed out, ‘be taking Holly to see our doctor. If there are any long-term ramifications—’ He paused, his attorney’s composure deserting him, unable to go on.

  Kate saw that his hands were trembling, and experienced a fresh surge of rage against her son. Nick had to have realized, damn him, what he was getting himself into – and given what he and Holly had apparently been up to in the summerhouse, this could hardly have been their first time. Changes she had been noticing in him swept suddenly, shockingly through Kate’s mind. She thought about the strange developments in his work, recalled a convers
ation with Beatrice Stein, Nick’s anxious and suddenly disappointed art teacher, three months ago – three months ago – and the abrupt realization that Nick and Holly might have been this deeply, this crazily entangled for so long, made her feel physically sick.

  Richard had rallied and was continuing. ‘If the doctor finds any signs of long-term repercussions, either physical or emotional,’ he said, ‘then we may still be forced to bring in the police.’

  ‘We understand,’ Ethan said, numbly.

  ‘I hope you do,’ Eleanor said.

  Repercussions.

  Kate stared miserably at her husband, and then back at the Bournes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, quietly. ‘We do.’

  Though he couldn’t hear the actual words, Nick, listening from his open bedroom door upstairs, put together a pretty fair picture of what was happening down in his own living room. But he never found out exactly what went on inside the Bournes’ house that night or in the days that followed.

  Kate and Ethan were perfectly clear with him on their own stance. They could try – with a great deal of difficulty – to empathize with him, they said, on the grounds of youth and passion and first love. But the law was plain, making those feelings, and most certainly the act itself, simply and utterly wrong; and threats of prosecution notwithstanding, Nick was going to have to comply exactly with the Bournes’ wishes, or face the consequences.

  ‘Which would mean juvenile court at best,’ Ethan reminded him.

  ‘They could lock you up, Nick,’ Kate added passionately, desperate to make him realize the direness of his situation.

  ‘I don’t see that they could prove rape,’ Ethan said, struggling for a scrap of comfort.

  It was the first time Nick had heard that word used. Horror filled him like sickness. ‘Holly didn’t say I raped her! I don’t believe that.’ It was a plea. ‘Holly could never have said I raped her!’