Chapter 3

I woke up slowly, a slight headache and slighter nausea the only traces of the night before, vanishing even as I thought about them. I turned my head slowly to one side, wondering whose weight made the bed tip and sway to that side, saw them lying there, wrapped in each other, Bob's arms tenderly protective, his face, even in' sleep, wearing a look of tender, proprietary concern. I didn't want to disturb them, but my movements as I tried to slip quietly from the bed woke him up. I watched as he slowly, carefully, removed his arms 'from Sarah and turned toward me.

"Hey," he whispered. "Don't disappear yet. Sarah had a lot to drink last night and won't be up for a while yet. The party went on for quite a while after we put you in here."

He showed no sign of excitement at my nudity. I sat down on the edge of the bed, remembering, and covered my face with my hands. "I didn't think it would be like that. They said it was fun, but it was horrible ... except with you. I don't like Charley and Jim. They're awful." I sobbed softly. I didn't want to wake up Sarah. "I wish all my parents' friends were like you and Sarah."

He looked embarrassed. Teary compliments didn't agree with him. "Charley isn't a very nice guy, Penny. These orgies are all his idea, really. He likes to make them do this kind of thing when people owe him money."

"What do you mean?" My tears vanished as I perked up. This sounded interesting.

"I mean he's a loan shark, as well as other things. People come to him when they can't borrow money any place else. He charges real high interest rates so it's hard to pay it back, too. Some loan sharks beat people up when they can't pay. It makes a good lesson for others. Charley, though, makes enough off the ones who do pay so he can have some fun with the ones who don't. He doesn't have to beat any one up."

"But what does he do when people can't pay?"

"He makes them get into orgies like this one. That's how he gets his fun."

I was disillusioned. My parents had told me this was all for fun, but now I found out the only fun was Charley's. Everybody else must have been forced into it. Still, it did make me feel better. I didn't have to think I was peculiar because I didn't enjoy it as much as the others seemed to. But, I wondered....

"Bob, do you think ... do you think Papa gave me all those lessons because Charley told him to?"

"What lessons?"

"Papa's been teaching me sex for years now, stretching me to get me ready and teaching me all kinds of tricks."

"I wouldn't be surprised." He looked sad. "It's the kind of thing Charley might do. He's got your father good and proper. He had to borrow money from him to keep the gas station going a few years ago, I understand. This is a good place for orgies.

Isolated, you know. No, I wouldn't put it past Charley at all. In a town like this your father would really be ruined if he let it out about the orgies. He has proof too, you know. He usually takes pictures when someone new comes into his group, pictures that show everything. They give him a little extra to keep people in line."

I was silent. I'd known it wasn't usual to be taught the things I'd learned, but it was nice to know that it wasn't my parents who were unusual. They'd been forced into it, and that can explain a lot.

"Do you owe him any, Bob?"

"Yeah, I did a silly thing. I borrowed, and then I couldn't pay it back. Sometimes I wish I were like Jim. I think he got into this with a gambling debt, but that doesn't matter. He really seems to like the situation."

I couldn't help but share his depression at the thought.

"I'm glad you don't, and I bet Sarah doesn't either. I bet that's why she likes you."

"You might be right. She hasn't told me so."

He lay back on the bed. I curled up against him, thinking. "Isn't there any way for you and Papa to get out of this? Can't you pay him back?"

"It isn't that easy, Penny. I told you what he can do. Now he can even threaten to tell what we did to you, and that would give your father even more trouble than the other stuff."

I put my head on his shoulder and cried. It had been awful, that orgy. And I could see that there were going to be many more like it.

He was petting me gently, soothing me, holding me close against his side, cuddling, when Sarah woke up. She rolled over toward us and said groggily, slowly rubbing her eyes with the back of one hand, "Wha's going on? Couldn' ya wake me up or sumpin, honey?"

When she saw my tears, though, she became more alert. "What's he been doing to you, Penny? After that spectacle last night, he should know better than to...."

Hastily, I reassured her. "It's all right, Sarah. He's been telling me about Charley and how he's so mean. I didn't know what he was like. Mama and Papa said it would be fun. I wish I could do something about him!"

"Don't we all, kid. But there isn't a thing. He's got himself too damn well covered."

The three of us lay there, wrapped in shared gloom and despair. Charley had brought us together, but they had something out of the mess. What did I have? Would it be worth it if I ever got anything out of it?

"Hey, up there! When are you gonna come down and get your breakfast? Don't keep them both to yourself, Bob!" It was Jim.

We didn't want anyone charging up to chase us down. The voice of tyranny was enough. We went as soon as I had dried my tears.

After we'd eaten, I tried to beg off from the rest of the orgy. I wanted time to think about what Bob had told me, but I only said I was sore from the night before and not feeling too well.

"It's probably all those drinks you had, poor dear," offered Betsy. She didn't approve of little girls drinking.

Charley laughed. "Give her a little hair of the dog. She'll be all right then."

"She's sore too, remember. Besides," said Sarah, "one day should be enough for any girl's first orgy."

"All right," he growled. "But, John, she'd better be able to stand things better the next time, you hear?" Bob's picture was clearer now. My father nodded, but looked relieved when I escaped to my room to be alone in my misery.

I was able to watch the rest of the orgy from my window for most of that day. I still thought of them as my parents' guests. I couldn't throw off the term I'd grown up with, though I now knew that most of them were more like flies caught in a spider's web.

That spider, though he had only two legs and a potbelly, was still wily enough to have his way. He kept Sarah by him for most of the day, forcing her to satisfy him in every way she could. She may have been a substitute for me, but that knowledge didn't help Bob. He fumed, whenever Carrie wasn't crawling all over him, and kept looking wistfully after her.

Pairings never lasted long. Jim would keep my mother only long enough to satisfy himself, then rush to pull Betsy from John, even if they were kissing wantonly, and throw himself upon her. The others shifted too, restlessly.

Eventually, Charley fell asleep from exhaustion, and Sarah ran to Bob, alone at the moment. They clutched and huddled together in one corner of the yard, passionlessly comforting each other until Jim noticed them and led her away to hold his prick in her hand while he rested, leaving Bob open to the desperately predacious grasping of my mother.

This pattern cycled several times, the pace slackening with repetition, until at last Bob and Sarah could be alone and undisturbed, taking refuge from the lashings of the web around them.

When my parents were together, I watched them clutch each other frantically before falling to the ground for an urgent coupling. Harriet cried out at the end with a note of what I took for utter despair as she swooned from Papa's efforts.

I didn't dare go downstairs again till after dusk and dinner, when I heard their cars drive off, leaving the house in its usual quiet stillness. There was no sound from the house at all, not even the usual small noises that accompanied my parents' movements around the house.

I found them in the living room, slumped exhaustedly on the couch, side by side. I threw myself on his naked, sweaty chest and cried, "Oh, Papa! I know why you let all this happen. Bob told me this morning!"

"There's not much to say, Penny. Not for me, anyway. I am sorry ... for letting him force us into putting you into that ... and that it was so ugly for you. I didn't think he'd be so ... so ugly."

He was defeated, sad. I wondered if he was always like this when one of their orgies ended. I had never seen him until he had had time to recover, to put on his mask Of normality again. It had to be a mask, to conceal the secret from the world. My father couldn't have kept his even temper in the situation Bob had described. Of course, his present mood could have been only for this one orgy, the orgy of my initiation, an orgy to crown a half-willing, half-anguished pimp.

"You mean you didn't want to think so," put in my mother. "You knew damned well what a bastard that Charley Mathews is. How you ever managed to get us into such a mess, I'll never know. You didn't have to go to him!"

"I did too! It was the only way I could get the money. I needed it fast, you know that!"

"I know that, all right. And I know you never once tried to get out of his grip! Sometimes I think you enjoy the stuff he makes you do! Getting your own daughter...."

"Stepdaughter!"

"... drunk like that and turning her over to a pair of beasts like him and Jim! I swear you were enjoying that spectacle last night."

"Don't let's talk like that, especially not in front of Penny," he moaned, holding his head in his hands.

"What do you mean? She knows all about it now. Bob told her! Weren't you listening?"

This was a side of my parents I had never seen. The argument sounded as if it had been often repeated, though not with me around. I didn't understand then how a person could be corrupted so much by the likes of a Charley. I had thought my stepfather a wonderful man, even though I had known that other fathers didn't give their daughters lessons like his. I still thought so, but to hear that he might have actually enjoyed my degradation changed my love for him. He was no longer the mountain of security he had been.

When I went to bed that night, I lay awake a long time, wondering what things would be like in the future, wondering how long I would have to t up with Charley and the poor souls his web had caught. I didn't want to wind up like them, tortured by unnatural demands, only to be, perhaps, finally broken and, my sins revealed to the world, to have all possibility of happiness torn from me.

But, I thought as my eyes at last began to shut, Bob's a pretty nice guy. Maybe....