Chapter 11
It was not all that unusual for Rod to wake up and find a woman in bed with him. After thirty years of free lance fucking a man got used to unusual situations. He also got used to waking up with a mind totally blank, and having to resort to all sorts of little subterfuges to avoid mentioning a name he might not even have known in the first place.
He lay perfectly still, suddenly and totally aware of the warm soft feel of a female body backed up against him. Son of a bitch! No wonder he had been sleeping in a tent. No wonder his dreams had been so vivid, reinforced with the pressure of a warm body against him breathing deeply and regularly. She was asleep, whoever she was.
Then suddenly Rod's relaxed stillness was converted into the rigidity of utter horror as he remembered who was spending the weekend in his apartment, whom he had bedded down on the couch -- who had wanted to sleep in this bed. Jesus H. Christ! If the law came pounding on the door and caught him in bed with this underage quiff they'd lock him up and throw away the key. And that would be nothing to what Rambling Rose would do!
Sweet festering feces! He was ruined. He could buy his way out of it, such being the vagaries of justice in a commercial country, but Rod knew with sickening certainty that before he got out of this shitpot he'd have signed over title to his building, his car, his boat -- every fucking thing he'd accumulated in thirty years would end up in some lawyer's pocket and Rod would be out on his ass, forty-five years old, gray haired, broke, unable even to find a job washing dishes. There was no fuck on earth worth that kind of price.
He had to get out of here, get his clothes on, erase every hint of wrinkle -- every clue to his presence in this bed. If this little bitch wanted his bed that bad, she could have it. But Rod . was going to bug out, get a room in some hotel, spend his time establishing alibis and proving it was all two other guys. No fucking way was he going to spend another minute alone with this goddam piece of jail bait!
And Rose -- god damn her ample ass! Rose's ass was going flying out that door the next time she showed up. Damn her! She was old enough to know better. Didn't she have any idea what kind of a mess she was getting him into? As if a quick blow job would stand up in court once somebody racked him on a statutory rape charge! He wondered if she had done it deliberately. Was his good old Rambling Rose trying to get some kind of a handle on him? It didn't make sense. She was a great one for Taking Over but Rose had never even hinted that she was interested in anything apart from his indefatigable cock. Well goddam her! She would never get a taste of that prodigious prod again. Never ever!
Oozing out of bed as quietly as he had one night thirty years ago on his way to Myrt's, Rod reached for his pants. Then abruptly he realized that pants and shirt were not enough this time. He intended to be fully and carefully dressed if it ever came to that -- not just pants and shirt like some Hairbreadth Harry gone flying out a bedroom window.
Hardly daring to breathe, he tiptoed about the bedroom easing drawers open, extracting a suit from his closet with an exaggerated care lest he tinkle a coat hanger. Sneaking continuous glances over his shoulder, he prayed the tousled blond head would not stir; that the girl's regular breathing would remain steady. Finally he had an arm-load of clothes. Still naked, he padded barefoot out of the bedroom and closed the door.
He was knotting his tie when the doorbell rang.
Shit! What should he do? Open it and get rid of whoever was there? Or wait, pretend there was nobody home, and then after a dozen rings that goddam juvenile delinquent would probably wake up and come padding out naked and naked and naked and make so goddam much noise asking him why he didn't answer the door that he would have to and how the fuck was he ever going to make anybody believe he hadn't fucked -- oh shit!
He put the chain on the door, opened it a crack, and hissed, "Somebody's trying to sleep in here!"
"Sorry." He could hear the pimples in that cracking voice. "Telegram. Sign here."
Rod signed the pad slipped through the door. Since when had they taken to hand delivering telegrams again? The last he'd heard the sons of bitches were mailing them and a telegram took three days longer than a first class letter. Then as he accepted the envelope that the boy outside traded for his signature Rod could see it was some kind of private messenger service. The boy was gone before Rod could decide whether or not to tip him. He bolted the door again and ripped open the envelope.
Unavoidably detained four more days. Will make it up to you when I return. Love, Rose.
God damn that miserable managing bitch! Fuck up his weekend, fuck up his life, fuck him out of every cent he owned for lawyer's fees, and then blithely fuck him out of four more days of his life and think she could pay for all of it by coming back here and giving him another quickie, assembly line blow job!
What was he going to do? There was only one thing he could do, Rod decided. Rose would be pissed off but he didn't much care what Rose thought -- not after this. She was probably off spending the week getting fucked in somebody's ski lodge anyway -- and leaving him stuck with her babysitting!
There was only one safe thing Rod could do. He could do the same thing any officer stuck in an unpopular war and doing something he knew was totally wrong could do: Rod was going to Cover His Ass. First, he would call up somebody at the county receiving home and explain the situation -- that some conniving bitch of a casual acquaintance had laid a kid on him, that he was a prim and proper man who had no intention of drawing comment or knowing looks from his neighbors, for some duly constituted authority to come and get this underage kid out of his apartment, and while you're at it, I want a doctor to look her over and give me a written receipt for undamaged goods.
He was reaching for the telephone when he remembered that the kid had already been hustled out of two homes already in the last day or two. Which didn't mean all that much to Rod. He had his own future to think about. Cover Your Ass! But if she woke up and over-heard him explaining the situation... Abruptly Rod decided he'd better do it another way. Get the hell out of here right now. Phone from down the street somewhere and not even come back until this luscious little piece of San Quentin Quail was long gone.
God damn it! He'd forgotten his shoes. He checked his pockets. Wallet, keys, credit cards, handkerchief. All he needed was a pair of shoes. He tiptoed in his socks to the bedroom door and stood listening a moment. Utter silence. He couldn't even hear her breathing.
Praying the door wouldn't squeak, he pushed it carefully open. She was still asleep. Blond hair covered most of her face. An arm was out of the covers and she had twisted and turned until one breast was exposed. Rod stood indecisive in the doorway. He ought to cover her up but if she woke she would assume he was doing just the opposite. And if she woke up and saw him staring at her what would she think? Either way his ass was mud. He began tiptoeing toward the closet and his shoes.
His hands were shaking so bad he could hardly get the closet door open. He stood looking into the closet with his back to the bare tit in his bed, trying to get a grip on himself. Jesus H. Christ! The way he was trembling and panting you'd think he'd never seen a tit before. As if he hadn't spent thirty years kissing them, sucking them, caressing and licking them, even fucking them on occasion when for familial or lunar reasons some amply endowed woman had preferred to enfold his needful knob in her cleavage instead of her cunt.
He knelt and suddenly realized his cock was harder than a worn out paint brush. Son of a bitch! After all the fucking and sucking he'd gotten scant hours ago. What was wrong with him? This goddam child wasn't even half grown. She still had a child's clear skin without the first hint of adolescent blemish. Her armpit had never known a razor. Probably her virginal little pussy would be as hairless as old Antoinette's had been that day when she was six and he was five...
That single bare fit that had drawn his eyes when he entered the room... suddenly Rod knew why he couldn't take his eyes away. Even in this permissive age so different from the uptight days of his boyhood -- even now when bare tits and asses stared at a man from every news stand and every magazine shop in this city...
Rod realized abruptly that, though he had seen and handled countless tits in the last thirty years, he had never seen one half grown in this peculiarly transitory stage of development. He fumbled in the closet and finally found a pair of shoes.. Clasping them to his chest, he got noiselessly to his feet and began edging out of the bedroom again.
The girl sighed and thrust her arms out. Twisting, she turned until she lay flat on her back. Now both of her firm little half-grown tits pointed defiantly skyward toward the ceiling of Rod's bedroom. Suddenly the room whirled and spun and Rod saw those two young tits through a pink haze. If he didn't get out of here he was going to have a heart attack.
Gasping and shaken, he managed to close the door and sit unnerved on the couch. He put the shoes on the rug and tried to pull himself together. Jesus! he told himself. It's only another pair of tits!
But it wasn't just another pair of fits. Rod had never seen a pair at exactly that stage of development: firm volcanic cones of perfect symmetry, still without a hint of the softness of sag that would come when they grew a little more and their firm jutting outline would soften into a rounded undersurface and a ski jump upper slope.
These tits would be too firm to jiggle. Their pink nipples and aureoles were still small and virginal but on this tiny perfect pair of cones they seemed disproportionately large, the nipples rock hard and skyward pointing even as she slept. They had, Rod supposed, grown so fast in the last few months that they would be terribly tender, susceptible to the slightest touch or rub of blouse or hand. Or hand...
Get the fuck out of here, he told himself. Get your shoes on and get out to a pay phone somewhere and call the county receiving home and stay the hell out of the way until they come and scoop her up and leave you to live the rest of your drab and wretched life in peace.
What would it feel like to get his hands on a pair of tits like this little blonde's, this Ellie's just once? Get out of here! Would they be firm and hard like the muscle in a weight lifter's biceps? Or would they have that same delicious warmth, that ineffable combination of firmness and yielding feminine softness that made a pair of tits feel so nice in a man's hands? Get out of here!
Were they really as perfectly symmetrical as he had thought? Surely anything that alluring must have some little yield. Maybe they were only symmetrical because she lay supine. What would they be like once she sat up? Jesus! So near and yet so far... Was there any possible way he could get a look at them with the girl standing or sitting?
No way -- unless she walked in her sleep. Suddenly he wondered if maybe she really did. How had she ended up in his bed? Who could tell what went on in a girl's mind at that age? If she was the kind of toughassed little underage pig he suspected, then why hadn't she grabbed his cock instead of quietly going to sleep with her back to him? Did she even know she was in his bed? If she didn't, and she were to wake up with him staring down at her...
Rod shuddered. He knew how shrilly little girls could scream.
But Jesus, what wouldn't he give for just one look at this lovely bodied little girl standing up! For just one feel!
Years ago when he had strained his back one day at the beach trying to convince a girl he was only thirty instead of nearly forty, Rod had experienced such intense pain that the doctor, a reader of Lil Abner, had given him some sleeping pills which Rod had known only as 'mule stupefier.' He still had a half dozen.
Shit! What was he thinking? Even if he could bring himself to do such a thing -- how could he ever get this sleeping beauty to take one? Get the fuck out of here and make your phone calls!
He wondered. Was there any alternative? There had to be some safe way to Cover His Ass. Rambling Rose was a good fuck and he didn't really want to kick her out. Nor did he want her to end up in the pokey as she most probably would if he were to call the county and get them to come take this luscious little piece of warm meat off his hands.
But Jesus! What could he do? A man alone... suddenly he realized what it must be like to be gay, to live in eternal fear of blackmail or extortion.' Every man bears within him the seeds of his undoing. Here all these years Rod had happily fucked his way through life without a thought of any blind spot. He had had the good sense never to marry, knowing perfectly well that he would never be able to remain faithful for more than forty-eight hours to one woman.
At forty-five Rod had thought he was home free. He had a steady income that he lived within. He had his health. He had more ass than he could use. How could he have known that this hidden appetite lurked within him all these years, just waiting for the moment when it could trip him up and turn all his golden age into shit? Get out of here! Go make your phone call!
He shuddered as his common sense warned him. You're allowed one phone call. As long as they were over eighteen or whatever it was in this state, nobody cared how many girls a man flicked. But this tiny, bare armpitted, half fitted, probably bare pussied blonde -- how old could she be? No use asking her. Any girl would lie her way past the magic number.
They would come tearing in here with guns and cameras and reporters and even if he somehow miraculously managed to prove he had never gotten into her Rod knew he could never face his neighbors again. He would have to leave this town, leave this state. Leave this life. Get out of here and make your phone call!
There was no safe way. No easy way. He had to go call the county and Cover His Ass. Never would he ever see the little girl stand up. Never would he know if those tits sagged just a tiny bit. Never would he ever get his hands on them. With a sigh fetched from his ankles, Rod began putting on his shoes and -- son of a bloody bitch! He'd sneaked in to his closet and what had he come out with?
Two left shoes!