Blessings, he said.
And then he was gone.
Herbie and Susie
Herbie had the itch. All boys did, he reckoned, but some were luckier than others. By his own estimation he was in that “others” category because even though his first date was two years behind him he hadn’t got to first base.
Oh, he had a girlfriend, all right, good looking too. She even won a beauty contest over in Rathbone, the rival football town twenty miles away. A cheerleader and all. But stuck up. Hands offy. Her mother blinked the porch light five minutes after they drove up from a date. Not much chance there.
Besides, he had her on a pedestal. He knew it was a bad idea but he just couldn’t help it. He knew the guys who claimed to be getting it didn’t put their girlfriends on a pedestal. Go figure, he thought. Girls wished to be worshiped but didn’t like the kind of boys who granted the wish.
Susie had a boyfriend too. Herbie guessed they were already doing it because he was a football star and he treated her like shit. Apparently, that added up to doing it. Apparently.
Herbie had grown up with Susie. Their fathers were on the faculty of the local college and they had gone on family retreats together ever since grade school. He’d never had a love interest in her. She was more like a friend. Her dad was the religion prof - had three daughters, all of them racy. Susie was the youngest.
Susie was a tomboy but as she matured she turned out to have a sexy quality about her that Herbie couldn’t figure. Maybe it was her eyes which were deep brown and didn’t waver holding his gaze, then dissolving, magically, right there in front of him, into softness. Or the way she walked without her head bobbing up and down. Maybe it was her tight breasts - he guessed it was the whole package. Herbie’s interest in Susie was purely physical, unadulterated by that impediment of impediments, the awful teen-age crush.
Therefore, she was someone he could talk to. So when he tried to kiss Rachael goodnight and her mother immediately turned on the lights, he told Susie about it.
“Find another girl,” said Susie.
Herbie was shocked. And in the aftershock there was a surprising sense of pleasure. Her confident frankness went against all that loyalty jazz he’d been hearing all his life, and did so with refreshing abruptness. It opened up a conversation in which he felt a freedom he’d never felt before, talking to a girl. He could tell her how Rachael would dance close to him, her soft breasts pushed into his chest, but she wouldn’t let him kiss her very often. And when she did, her body pulled away.
Susie asked if he’d ever touched her breasts.
He was excited by the question and he wanted to say yes. But something about the conversation felt fragile. He couldn’t risk harming that.
“Just do it,” Susie advised. “If you wait to be invited, it’ll never happen.”
Thus began an informal lover’s consultation in which Herbie would report progress or lack thereof and Susie would offer her little practical encouragements. From time to time Susie would put her hand on Herbie’s arm as if to reassure him or to say there is, after all, tenderness in the world. He had to admit it felt really good. It was almost worth having a lover’s problem just to get this kind of female attention.
The relationship with Rachael was going nowhere. It took him three dates to get up enough courage to try touching her breasts and he so concentrated on it, that he stumbled awkwardly in conversation several times leading up to it. Finally he just plopped his hand on her. She looked at it, brushed it off and stormed in the house.
“How did it feel?” Asked Susie.
“Great!”
“Well then, wasn’t it worth it?”
“Yeah, but what now?”
Even Susie didn’t have much to say. And in the silence that followed a sense of inevitability about the Herbie-Rachael thing hung over the both of them, felt, but not voiced, as if out of respect for the terminally ill.
Then that fantasy about Susie flashed in his head, the one he started having about the time she was going through puberty that involved breaking into the University pool in the middle of the night and fooling around. He’d fantasized several versions in the long evening hours after bedtime, in that rush of growth spurts and hormones, before he could finally get to sleep. Mainly he was curious about the luscious parts of a girl’s body he hadn’t had the good fortune to either see or touch.
On a lark, and probably because with Susie he didn’t care to the extent of paralysis if he got refused or even if he offended her a little, one day he just blurted out, “why don’t you and I sneak into the University pool sometime for a midnight swim.”
To his everlasting amazement she just cocked her head to one side and said, “Sounds like fun.”
It was summertime. The days were warm and the nights stayed warm all through. There were no students on campus. Perfect! Now, how to do this.
The pool stayed locked at night. Susie thought she could get the key because her father was on the athletic committee and during the summers he made the key available to the faculty and their families. The plan was to slip away from their houses around 11:45 on a Monday night, the dullest most untrafficed night of the week, and meet in the shadows of the Athletic Pavilion nearby. Susie lived one block from campus, Herbie, a mile away. He practice-walked that mile several times to get his timing perfect. It was all set.
During the week that lay between, Herbie went over and over in his mind how this was going to go. While trying hard to think about the pleasures they might have he mostly obsessed about the many ways they could get caught and how bloody the conversations that followed would surely be... parents leaning over a spotlighted son, sweat, interrogation... horror the color of film noir.
While he wasn’t suffering from his imagined persecution at the hands of angry authorities and parents he was wondering how to handle the bathing suit thing, since no one had mentioned it. Naturally, he wanted to skinny dip but he figured himself lucky to be this far along and he wasn’t going to push it. After much thought he decided to wear his suit under his jeans and take his queue from her.
It appeared to his mother that Herbie was losing a lot of sleep, so much so she even suggested he take an afternoon nap. “Just thinking about my career,” he said - “astrophysics? Medicine? you know.” He nodded his head responsibly.
Monday finally came and Herbie went to bed early in hopes the others would follow and therefore be locked in a deep sleep when his adventure began. He watched the clock every five minutes and was so worried with all the details that finally, in desperation, he started reciting the names and batting averages of all the short stops in the National League. Two times through and he started on the American League. Then Carl Yastremski’s home run output year by year, the names of all the baseball parks...
Finally, 11:30 came. 3 minutes to get out of the house and 12 minutes to walk to the pool. He went to the window he had oiled to the point of frictionless grace, and opened it. He knew his foot, sliding down the outside wall of the house had to miss the holly bush which rattled when it moved, and land in the small patch of grass next to it. Yes! Then he deftly slipped out between the shrubbery into the broad out of doors.
His heart didn’t stop flipping like a cod fish until he got out of ear shot and eye sight of the house. His breathing became less restrained as he slipped easily along the alleyways and dark sides of the streets by the route he had plotted and rehearsed for days. He arrived untroubled at the Athletic Pavilion.
Susie wasn’t there. He expected that. But 30 minutes later Susie still wasn’t there. He hadn’t expected that. In the intervening moments he had plenty of time to wonder if she’d been caught. If her parents had called his parents and they were already on their way to seize him. He had an urge to turn back and play like he was just out on a walk if they found him. But hearing no sirens, he decided to stick it out another 15 minutes.
>
Just then Susie slipped in by his side, panting and out of breath. “I ran,” she said. “Sorry. My folks stayed up for the Tonight Show. Can you believe it? They never do that.”
Her words hit him with a new sensibility. They were spoken as if to a companion with a sense of camaraderie, an unspoken understanding of united purpose. They were on the same side against the world. They were partners in a grand adventure. It made him chill with pride.
“And I couldn’t get the key. Dad must have loaned it to someone.”
Herbie had anticipated that. “I go over this fence all the time,” he said. “We can make it.”
He made a webbing of his hands and she stepped in. Her hip pressed against his chest as her arm reflexly went around his neck and tugged on him. The side of her breast brushed against his cheek.
He brought her up within reach of the top railing. “You’ll have to pull yourself over,” he said. But Susie couldn’t do it. Herbie put his hand to her bottom to give her an extra boost and as he did, his thumb slipped between her cheeks. She giggled as he proceeded into the push leaving the thumb where providence had placed it.
Susie was over and down the other side. Herbie sprang up, looping his fingers into the chain links, and using his shoes in traction perpendicular to the fence, walked to the top. He jumped from there.
By the time he reached the ground Susie had stripped to the waist - so much for the swimsuit issue, he thought. In the time it took him to get his tight jeans over his feet she was stark naked. She smiled briefly, then turned and walked to the pool.
Her body flashed before him like an apparition of luminance in the night. In the seconds that followed, and while he was slipping out of his clothes, his mind tried to reconstruct her form. But being inexperienced and thus having no frame of reference established, and just possibly because of extreme excitement, the photographic plate of his mind rinsed clean. No use. He’d already forgotten what she looked like naked. It was also no use pulling his shirt over his head, having forgotten, in his excitement and haste, to unbutton the top button. Not wanting to retreat he wasted precious time dancing like an inverted umbrella in a storm, trying to wrestle it off. Finally he gave in, put the shirt back on and unbuttoned it.
All this time Susie was standing statue-like at the edge of the pool, her long hair reaching the middle of her back, her hands relaxed at her side, her hips like two tight fists, her head bowed slightly as if gazing into the motions of the waters.
As he came alongside she took his hand. “I thought we should go in together,” she said.
The steps down to the shallow end lay in before them. As they descended they felt the cool waters rise up their legs to their thighs, loosening the tension of their muscles and the tautness of their skin as it engulfed them completely. They could feel on their unwrapped bodies every splash and swirl licking around their feet, legs, now thighs, hips... and at that point and with a little burst of energy, they swam to the center of the pool.
“Feels great!” Whispered Susie.
Herbie made a dive and swam under her surfacing on the other side. Susie did the same. Herbie dived again, this time blowing bubbles that rose up to her, slipping along her thighs and torso like tiny fingers reaching for the surface. He could hear her giggle even under the water. Susie did the same, then turned and started swimming toward the deep end of the pool. Herbie dived under again, this time turning over to watch her swimming along above him.
The light of the half-moon rising illuminated her in a green-blue phosphorescence that limned her gliding silhouette. It gave her a frosted look that danced with the motions of her body. But there was a second quality of light, which, bouncing off the walls of the pool and diffusing among the waters, rose as if from no single source, painting her form in such a mysterious way he could hardly distinguish what he saw from what he imagined.
He believed he saw effervescence streaming from her neck, slipping over her shoulders to her chest, dividing around her breasts then diving down her torso to curl among the curly hairs, lifting, separating.
He surfaced and then she, following his example, dived under and swam along face up underneath him. His skin tingled from the pressure of her looking.
To anyone watching they might have been two dolphins frolicking in the waters, diving, surfacing, rolling on their backs with little dolphin-like squeals of delight as they startled and surprised each other.
The frolic carried them to the deep end of the pool where they clung to the wall, breathing hard.
“Having fun?” Asked Susie.
“You bet.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty nice.” And after a little pause, “My mother would kill me if she knew I was doing this. It’s hard to believe we’re here.”
“It seems we are.”
“Can you see Rachael ever doing this?”
“Never. Would Johnny?”
“He’s not a spontaneous guy.”
They were content to stay there a while, near to each other but not touching, hardly talking at all, resting. Breathing. Herbie delighted by this closeness, imagining the details of her body, alive and moving in a suspension of water very near to him, he, engaged in a rapturous sense of freedom, undisturbed by worry he always felt with Rachael. He always had to wonder whether he was doing the right thing to please her. He about to suggest another frolic when, out of the corner of his eye he caught a flicker of light darting along the wall of the Athletic Building, then another.
“Shh... ” he said. “Night watchman!”
He looped his hand around her waist and pulled her to a spot along the edge of the pool shielded by an overturned chez lounge on the bank. In the force of his grasp she turned so that her back was to him. As they came to rest in their hiding place her body nestled into the curve of his. She did nothing to free herself but instead, wrapped her arm tightly over his.
He could smell the essence of herbs and spices in her hair and felt the cool, wiry feel of the matted strands brushing against his cheek, the nakedness of her body touching his, the rise and fall of her breathing pressing against the circle of his arms.
The night watchman approached the pool, flashing his torch this way and that. Herbie drew her tight against him and realized his arm was bracing her at the lower margin of her breasts. He said a little prayer of thanksgiving followed by a petition against the looming possibility of discovery.
The night watchman stayed a very short time and left without incident. But his visit created an arc of danger in which arose an intimacy they’d not known between them. It must have been pleasing for they remained in their embrace a little longer than they needed to. Once released, they stayed close to each other, her hand on his shoulder, his on her waist.
“That was close,” whispered Susie. “Can you imagine what would have happened if we had been caught?”
“I’ve been imagining it all week.”
Susie giggled. “I could feel you bumping against me,” she said. Then she paused. When she spoke again her tone changed. “That was sweet,” she said.
Herbie hoped it was dark enough to conceal his fiery blush.
“That reminds me,” Susie said, and hoisted herself partly out of the water up onto the bank. She faced her torso outward and supported herself on her elbows, her back arched, her breasts pointing to the heavens.
“What to you think?” she asked.
Herbie had many thoughts, none, he thought, could he mention.
“About these, silly,” Susie said, looking down at her breasts.
“Fantastic!” He said.
“Well, you always wanted to touch some. What are you waiting for?”
There was none of the awkwardness of the Rachael episode in Herbie’s hands. His fingers drifted over her in a state of unconcealed reverence, steadied by the confidence that comes from preordained permission. T
wo fingers glided up the lower slope of her left breast to the top, encircled the tip then traveled down through the valley to the other.
She laughed. “All the guys want to do that. Why is that?”
Herbie was looking at her skin, slippery with water and sweat. He was watching it dimple slightly to his touch.
“Because we don’t got these,” he said.
She laughed out loud. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They don’t break.”
Herbie took that as a request for something stronger so he put his hand full-faced on her breast and grasped it, hard.
Her eyes closed and her mouth dropped ever-so-slightly open. Her head drifted back just a smidgen. Herbie held her firmly this way for a while kneading his fingers into her softness. She swallowed and opened her eyes and looked down at him feeling her. It occurred to Herbie that he was showing her what it looked like to be felt.
He moved to the other breast and circling with his hand, squeezed until the nipple elevated and enlarged, pointing outward. She seemed to turn her shoulder toward him, pushing deeply into his grasp, thrusting against his hand. Her eyes looked alternately at him and at his hands on her, with a look in her eyes that was a mixture of amusement and pleasure.
“Does it feel good?” He asked.
“More interesting is that it makes you feel good,” she said.
Suddenly, she turned toward him and slid into the water. He kept his hand on her, now discovering the buoyancy of her breasts bumping against him, lifted and shaped by the waters.
She looked at him with a quizzical spark in her eye, then reached down and grabbed his penis. Herbie was stone hard.
“Oh my!” she said. And squeezed him tight. And, as she was springing away from the bank on the thrust of her strong legs, cocked against the wall in a motion carefully concealed while Herbie wasn’t paying attention, she said, “Tag. You’re it.”
Susie was a good swimmer. In the three seconds it took Herbie to realize what was going on, she was a quarter of the way down the pool. He was paralyzed another three seconds with worry he wouldn’t be able to swim with such a boner.
Secret in the Open Page 4