Rosie O'Dell (19 page)

I HAVE OFTEN BEEN
astonished, looking back, at how
Rosie and I became so intimate so fast. I had no real sense that Rosie was
taking the lead, but I don’t recall that she inhibited any of our actions of
intense love and overpowering desire, over those months, either. Once, not long
after the beginning, I said to Rosie, “We seem to be kind of young to be doing
all this stuff.” And she replied with a laugh, “Speak for yourself, sweets. I
don’t know how old Romeo was, but Juliet was only thirteen, and look how naughty
she was. So I’m okay with this.”

It started with long delicious tongue-entangled kisses whenever we were alone.
I went beyond that one Saturday evening during the first month of high school.
She and I were down in the entertainment room of her house waiting for
Casablanca
to come on television. Her mother was two flights of
stairs up, Pagan was back at school on the mainland, Rothesay was away on
medical association business, and Suzy had said no to Rosie’s invitation to join
us to watch the movie: “I’ll give you two lovebirds a night to
yourselves.”

We were drinking the Coke floats Rosie had made and eating pizza when the movie
began. “Oh look,” I said as the credits rolled, “
Ingmar
Bergman. I just
adores
her and Bogie.” Rosie looked at me sharply and then laughed
out loud at my mockery of myself over having confused Ingrid Bergman with Ingmar
a couple of years ago. Her burst of hilarity made her spill some Coke and ice
cream onto the front of her blouse and slacks.

“Oh shoot,” she said, standing up, and wiping the mess off with a serviette.
“That’s going to be wet and sticky all night. Back in a sec.” She tore
out of the room and up the two staircases. A minute later she
flew down the stairs again and into the room in her bare feet. “Did I miss
anything?” she asked, flopping back on our couch and laying her legs across my
thighs. She had changed into pyjamas and dressing gown.

“No,” I said. “That was fast. The credits just finished.” I rested my arms on
her legs and glanced at her feet beside me, confirming how beautiful they
were—creamy, and high-arched and perfectly proportioned to the ankles and
calves. I could see the remnants of the tennis toenail on her left big toe she’d
written me about earlier that summer.

“I hope you’ll excuse the informal attire, sire. It was the quickest I could
find to put on.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I don’t stand on ceremony,” I said. I laid my palm on
the toes of her right foot and gave them a little squeeze.

“Nice,” she whispered and took my other hand in her two.

The first commercial break she went to pull herself up by my arm, but I wasn’t
prepared and toppled over sideways gently on top of her. In that position we
giggled and kissed, and when I moved my hands around her back, I noticed the
absence of a bra strap. I also noticed the softness of her chest pushing against
mine. After a minute, I moved one of my hands from her back and placed it on her
breast outside the gown and pyjama top. She removed her lips from mine to
whisper, “Do you like the feel of that?”

All but fainting, I whispered back, “Yes, I really do.” And the truth was I had
never felt anything so soft and full and yielding and firm and delicate and
entirely delightful in my life. That was—I could hardly make myself believe
it—her naked breast in there.

“I really like your hand there, too,” she murmured. Then the movie came back
on and we turned to the set to watch. She held my hand in place with hers.

During the second commercial break, my hand undid a button and slipped inside
her pyjama top, and my caressing of her nipple as we kissed made us miss the
next scene of the movie. By the third, fourth, and fifth breaks, both my hands
were inside her pyjamas, all her buttons were undone, I was examining closely
the loveliness of the symmetrical shapes and the pink nipples, and she was
unbuttoning my shirt and pulling up my undershirt to press her naked breasts
against my naked chest.

When the movie ended, she broke off our kiss and whispered, “You can kiss them
too if you want to,” and without waiting to hear if I wanted to or not, she
pulled my head towards her chest and put first her left nipple and then the
right between my lips for me to kiss and suck, and so on alter
nately for several minutes. “I love you so much,” she said, cradling my head
in her arms. Meanwhile, I had an erection so hard it was painful. For some
reason, I felt I should hide it from her, and turned my hips away. At that, she
gently pushed my head back, affording me one last gaze at her breasts before she
buttoned up her top and pulled her gown together and tied it resolutely. “Whew,”
she breathed. “That’s good enough for one night.” That sounded like there’d be
other nights. Could life get any sweeter? “What do you say we heat up the rest
of the pizza? I don’t know about you, but all that excitement has got me starved
to death.” She stood to go upstairs and pulled me by the hand.

“Me too,” I said, but I could not stand up yet without imagining that I would
look like a pole vaulter. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

She bent over to kiss my mouth, unsuccessfully, because there was too big a
grin on her face. “Take your time, my sweetness and light. I’ll go up and stick
it in the oven.”

Walking delicately up the stairs a few minutes later, making sure my footsteps
didn’t jar too much, I groaned to myself, so this was lover’s nuts. No wonder
every male I knew was obsessed with scoring rather than cuddling. Nevertheless,
lover’s nuts is what I kept giving myself, caressing and kissing Rosie’s breasts
during the three times we could steal an hour alone at her house over the next
two weeks.

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.