Chapter 3
WHAT I'VE PUT DOWN IS ABOUT THE WAY I TOLD it all to my psychiatrist: the one they sent me to. Maybe it would seem hard to remember what happened to me when I was sixteen, now that I'm almost twenty-three. It was hard to remember at first, but the psychiatrist, Dr. Wellington, kept asking the right questions; and it all came back. I'm not putting any of his questions down because he *aid they really weren't very important. It was what happened to me that was important.
So this is a kind of diary, I guess, except that you write in a diary every day, and I'm writing this all at once. It was my idea, but Doctor Wellington said it was good therapy and would fill in my time here at The Center and after a while they would let me out.
The Center is half jail and half hospital, but where I am doesn't matter much, either. It's what happened that counts.
And like I said, all the past came back to me and is very easy to write down. Most of it happened after I left the house where Sis and I lived together, but quite a little happened before that, too. There was the guy who played with me in the balcony, my first guy, and how it worked out afterward.
Like I said, he was the real beginning, and that's why I guess I keep going back to him. Also, Dr. Wellington said that first encounter with a man brought out some of the key facts in my personality.
He said a lot more. Why I was like I was — and like I am. But I can't get very excited about that. I am what I am and that's that. He had a lot of big words to explain it, but I can cut all his big words down into three little ones: I like sex.
I like men.
I like the things men do to me. I like the things I do to men. And it all adds up to three little words. I like sex.
It wasn't all peaches for the men, though. Some of the things I found that I liked were kind of rough. The guy in the balcony found that out.
Dr. Wellington told me about that too, with a lot more big words. Sadist. Masochist. Uninhibited libido. And a lot more. But I could reduce those, too. What they added up to was that I wanted it all. Every experience. And I was never afraid of anything.
A couple of days after that guy called, he came in person. There was a knock on the back door just after I got home from school, and I found him standing there. He was the same one I'd decided on in the lobby when I'd come from the balcony that day. He looked at me the same way. Not at my boobs. Down at the middle, as though he was remembering how it felt.
"Hi, chick!"
He didn't scare me. Not at all. I looked straight back at him and said, "What do you want?"
I guess he had an uninhibited libido too, because with us it wasn't the way it was with other people: thinking one thing and saying another. Being either polite or scared, I could never really tell which. With us, we said what we thought.
"What do I want?" He looked straight at my body. "You."
"Who are you?"
"My name's Lex."
"Lex what?"
"Just Lex, baby."
"You've got a big nerve. My mother's in the living room right now and — "
"Baby, you haven't got a mother. You've got a sister, and she's upstairs asleep."
"How did you know that?"
"I'm a careful guy," he grinned. "When I want something, I stake the joint out. I check and re-check, and when I know the lay of the land, then I move." He kept on grinning. "And baby, I think I've found me the right land."
What he said was vulgar and I wondered how he could be so sure he wouldn't get his face slapped. By what had happened in the balcony, of course. But he'd taken a chance there, too.
"I should have yelled in there and got the manager after you."
"Baby," he drawled. "Wouldn't you have looked funny squealing to the manager with your skirt around your neck and your panties in your hand?
Those panties. Ugh! "My sister will be down any minute."
He pushed past me and into the kitchen. "She won't be down for three or four hours and you know it."
"She ' hear us, though."
"We're going to make a lot of noise?"
"You seem to have it all planned out."
His grin softened a little. "Look, honey, I'm not as tough as I look. I took a chance on you in the balcony because you were keeping me awake nights."
"Now you're sleeping again?" "Not very well. How about the pantry?" "Are you hungry or something?" He'd walked into the pantry, and I followed him. I had a cute little way of lying to myself that I had to admit to after Dr. Wellington told me about it, but I guess I knew about it all the time. Kind of like two parts of me inside when I got excited. Two people, one lying to the other with the other knowing the lie but accepting it.
Like when he went into the pantry I knew exactly what he had in mind, it was close and private. But I told myself maybe he wanted something to eat and that justified my letting him go in and going in after him.
It was a small place with just enough room for a person to lie down on the floor if they pulled their feet up.
He reached around behind me and pulled the door shut as I said, "There's some cookies in that can.
"In what can?" he asked innocently.
"The one on the shelf."
"I'm not interested in that one."
Being so close to him made me terribly excited. He was different than Frank. He was thick and solid and would have looked like an idiot dancing. But we weren't on a dance floor or anywhere near one. The masculinity of him was weakening my knees already. He was in my nostrils and under my skin, and I had a dozen quick visions about him. I didn't know what was going to happen there in the pantry, but it didn't take me long to select one of the images and kind of lay it aside. That happened when he turned around to close the pantry window, and I saw how tight his slacks were against his buttocks. That was when I made plans for the next time we met. I was that far ahead of him.
At the moment, I decided to be completely negative; and as I stood there it occurred to me that it was like an exciting story — one I was reading — and I could hardly wait to see what was going to happen.
He turned back from the window and looked straight into my eyes. "I've got you figured, baby."
The way he looked at me, I wondered if he thought he was a hypnotist or something. I looked right back at him.
"You have?"
I didn't make it tough or anything, though. I made it sound like a surprise, as though I were a little embarrassed at having been found out.
And the surprise I purposely put into my voice must have given him confidence because his grin deepened, and he let a little contempt creep in.
"Yeah. You're the kind that stands and takes it."
"Negative, you mean?"
"Negative, baby. Because you want it, and you can't help yourself. You'll take a man any way you can get him because you're afraid he'll run away."
Maybe he was right with a little of that. And I was glad he'd gotten the other impression, about my being negative.
"You're all wrong," I said. But I said it in a way that would make him sure he was a hundred percent right.
"We'll just get a little better acquainted today, he said. "Later, we'll get down to business."
"That's what you think. I can yell and my sister will come."
"But you won't."
"You sound awfully sure."
"Cut it out," he sneered, and then he was kissing me.
The way he kissed was to open his mouth and put it over mine. Then holding me against the door, he reached up and put his finger on my chin and pulled it down so that my mouth opened, too.
I felt his tongue. It was the first man's tongue I had ever touched with my own, and it was like fire running all through me. I held my tongue back and made him reach for it. He pushed his mouth harder on mine and kind of growled in his throat. I was glad he did, because if I'd given him my tongue at first, I'd have looked eager; and I didn't want to. This way, he'd think I'd done it because I was afraid of him.
We fought that way for a while, locked together there against the door. The fire was going clear through me as I tried to push his tongue out of my mouth. Then he closed his lips around it and created a vacuum, and I was fighting the other way, trying to get it back.
When I did, it hurt at the roots where it had been pulled. But the pain was good.
He was leaning against me now, panting, and we didn't touch each other in the middle. His hands were doing something, but I didn't feel them.
His face was in my neck, and I could feel his hot breath. "Did you go for that, honey?" he said in thick voice.
"If I said I didn't, I suppose you'd hit me."
"Maybe."
"Then I liked it. I liked it a lot."
"Do you want some more?"
"What would you do if I said no?"
I know my line was irritating him, but he didn't quite know what to do with it. He was getting what he wanted, but I wasn't giving him the satisfaction of panting for it.
"Maybe I'd slug you."
"All right, then I want more. A lot more. All you've got."
I could feel his grin against my neck. "You're going to be surprised at what you get, honey."
It was weird. We were there in the pantry making love. I wasn't resisting so it wasn't rape. I was going along, meeting him halfway, yet we were fighting. We were enemies.
I guess all men and women are enemies when they make love. They fight to drag pleasure out of each other, and it's a kind «f a war.
Maybe that was why Sis and Frank called each other vile names while they were in the heat of passion. A deep instinct to kill the thing you're making love to.
Maybe I wanted to kill Lex but not right away.
His hands were He put my mind on other things. His hands were behind my head, and all of a sudden he clamped down on my hair and twisted while he pushed at the same time.
It was either take it or go in the direction he wanted to, and that meant bending my knees. They hit the floor.
"What do you want?"
"Baby, don't be stupid. You know what I want."
"The hell with you!"
"Sure, but that doesn't change anything."
I saw what he'd done with his hands when they hadn't been touching me — the closest I'd ever been to a man and it was a good thing I was on knees, because they would have collapsed.
And I wanted to. That wild, reckless, hot feeling came, and I wanted to. But I couldn't let him know.
"Let me up. I'll scream."
His laugh was shaky. "Baby, the smartest thing you can do right now is what I ask."
It was an answer to what I'd said, but it was a nasty remark at the same time. I hated him, but at the same time I was shaking all over. My insides were turning to molten fury again and burning down into my legs.
I held myself together as hard as I could and when he saw that he laughed again.
"It won't do any good. I want my payoff, and I'm going to get it."
I turned my head away quick and said, "That's what you think."
When he jerked toward me again, I was silent. "Baby," he drawled. "All I want to do is kiss you."
I whimpered a little at the way he was pulling my hair.
"You want to kiss me, don't you baby? Come on, give poppa a great big kiss!"
I wanted to, God how I wanted to. It seemed as though I had been born for this, and it was as natural as breathing. But I was thinking of the next time, when I wanted him off his guard; and what I was doing was a way of setting him up. "Come on, baby."
I said to myself, you stupid idiot, make me! Quit just standing there while I wait.
Then he did. He bent his knees a little and reached down and grabbed my boob. I guess it hurt, but I was in that kind of excitement where I didn't know pain from pleasure.
But I got the signal and reacted with a quick yelp. Then a sigh of satisfaction came from him, and I tried to jerk away, as though I'd been tricked and was trying to fight out of it.
But not too hard because his nails dug into my scalp under the hair, and I whimpered again. Not loud either, because I couldn't.
My arms were around him, but that was all right because there wasn't anyplace else to put them. And I didn't have to keep alert now. He had me, and I'd surrendered because there wasn't anything else to do.
So I could give my whole attention to this new experience. It was something I'd never imagined or dreamt about. But right in the beginning I knew I would need protection from his vigor. His passion was flaming, making him writhe, and I freed one of my hands from behind and used it to grasp and control him. He didn't object. I slanted my eyes upward and saw him braced and leaning back. His face was toward the ceiling, and I saw the edge of his stupid half-grin, the kind of fixed expression that goes with a man's passion. I would see a lot more expressions like that one, but this was the first. His mouth was a little open, and his eyes were half closed; his head jerked with the same motion as his hips.
My head banged against the door behind me as his passion got more frantic. I heard him mutter, "God, baby —oh, God!"
I kept my fist in the way and felt the drive of his lust. He wasn't holding me now, his hands were against the door behind me and he kept muttering, "Oh, God! It's so damned good!"
In passion, he was as helpless as a baby, and I made a note of that, filed it away. He was vulnerable. I could have brought him shrieking to his knees with one quick grab at the unprotected part I'd squeezed before.
But I thought of the sea. A crazy thing about a time like that, but I thought of the sea, the depths of the sea where all the life came from.
And then I knew that I would do exactly what he wanted.
I removed my fist and took him into my mouth.
"Baby. Baby. Baby!!" he muttered.
I had complete power over him. I could do anything. If I bit down, he would never have sex again. But that was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to reduce him to jelly and biting wasn't the way to do that. Sucking would work much better.
Even though he wasn't touching me I started to get that feeling. That feeling that I now know as sex. My eyes glazed over and I started to feel really good inside . It was as good for me as it was for him. And it was really good for him. He was making noises that weren't even words.
Then, suddenly, he came and filled my mouth with his disgusting fluid. I choked and for a moment I couldn't breathe. I whimpered uncontrollably, then coughed and spit it out. At least I spit out as much as I could.
That angered him. His face twisted. He lifted his hand to hit me, but I opened the door just then and went out into the kitchen.
When I turned to look at him, I saw what a sadist he was. He got a kick out of hurting things. And I got kind of a mystic feeling on top of the excitement that was still hot inside me. Similar types are drawn to each other.
"My pigeon," he sneered. Then, as a contemptuous gesture, he opened his trousers and began putting himself together. He did it slowly and openly, exaggerating the motions, making lewd and indecent motions until he finally got his belt buckled. He looked at me with an expert eye.
"You're still hot, aren't you?"
And I said, "Yes," before I could catch myself.
"Well, stay that way," he sneered. "I like my pigeons hot."
"Get out of here!"
"Sure, honey. But I'll be back. Before I'm through, I'll have you doing tricks you never heard of."
He left, and I was glad he'd insulted me so much. I wouldn't have to feel sorry for him after I gave him his lumps. I knew there would be more pleasure in it for me than if he'd been a nice guy.
But I had my own problems at the moment. What had happened in the pantry came back at me, hot and exciting, and I headed for my room. Once in bed, I was in the pantry again: but it was different. Lex was doing the choking and the whimpering.
After I relaxed as I always did and was comfortable, I thought of a funny thing. I'd been with a man twice. There had been aberrations. It had been as uninhibited as you could get.
But I was still a virgin . . .