Chapter 2
Tina found the other two girls primping in front of the mirror. She closed the door behind her, shutting herself away from the disturbing presence of the three men. She leaned back against the door and let her heart have a chance to slow. The whole scene in the bathroom hadn't lasted more than five minutes. In that short length of time that rubbery thing inside her had been stretched and stretched into that agonizing tension and now she had to breath deeply and tell herself to relax.
She felt no resentment toward Ernie for leaving her in that horrible state of frustration. She'd known for a long time that Ernie wasn't the one with the key. She went on seeing Ernie because he was fun. He just didn't have what it was going to take to stretch her to the breaking point, to that glorious release where things would snap into place inside of her. Sure, he enjoyed her body, but she didn't think that was his only reason for seeing her. That was why she didn't drop him out of her life as she had dropped all the others. Of course, Ernie wanted that same old thing that all the others had wanted. It was an old story for a girl who had been the neighborhood slut at the age of thirteen. But at least Ernie had fun with her and was nice to her.
Jean Loras wore one of those ridiculously girlish bathing suits with a little skirt. Jean was tall, slim. Her legs were a bit thin for Tina's taste, but her thighs were full and left no open space when she stood with her legs together. Her hair was light brown, lighter than her eyes. She wore it loose with straight, falling sweeps which touched her shoulders. She filled the halter of the suit adequately. She was brushing her hair, standing close to Pat Emory, taller by six inches than the blonde girl.
Pat looked out at the world from behind curtains of straight, blonde hair which nearly hid her face. Tina knew Pat better than she knew Jean Loras. Pat was a sophomore who had been in Tina's sorority from the time they both were pledged. Pat was quite a girl, stuffed into her skin with full curves which promised sensuous delight and, Tina knew, delivered on that promise with regularity. Pat was all right. She knew the score. However, there were times when that peek-a-boo hair got on Tina's nerves. You could never quite see all of Pat's face. You never knew exactly what Pat was thinking.
Pat was along a year ago when the group from
College Hill made it to Lundy Beach for the Labor Day weekend. During that three days, Tina had come to know Pat fairly well. Pat had a knocked-out way of looking at things. She was paired off that year with a nice looking senior and they spent more time in the sack than they did on the beach. Pat didn't make much effort to hide the fact that she was sleeping with the boy.
"This is the twentieth century," she told Tina one night on the beach, when everyone was two-thirds stewed. "People are always telling me I have a sexual problem, but I like sex. I think the problem comes in when you don't like it."
That was Pat. Her motto for living was: "I like sex."
"Tina," Jean Loras said in her little girl's voice, "aren't you going to get into a suit? Pat and I are going for a quick dip while everyone is getting settled."
Tina made a face which Jean couldn't see. Jean's look-at-the-sweet-innocent-little-girl routine made her sick. She didn't know why the hell she had consented to having Jean in the same room with her. With Pat, there wouldn't be any problem. It would just be a matter of saying, "Blow, Pat. I'm going to use the room." She certainly hadn't come to Lundy Beach to listen to gush-gush talk about how wonderful that creep in glasses was. That's all she'd heard on the drive down. Jean had talked about her wonderful David for one hundred miles. David looked as if he'd curl up and die if a girl French kissed him. Tina hated goodie-goodie people, and David was always lecturing about something. Now here she was, tied up with David's sweet, innocent little girl. Jean was probably the kind who would want to be in bed, alone, at ten o'clock. That wasn't Tina's idea of the way to spend the last beach weekend of the year.
"I think I'll pass," she told Jean. "You two run along. I want to freshen up a little."
Pat looked at Tina, cold green eyes almost hidden by the curtains of blonde hair. The look was shrewd and knowing and it made Tina want to smack the blonde in the nose.
Pat wore a bikini. No little girl's skirts for her. She had a body and she was proud of it. It wasn't the most extreme type of bikini, but it showed a lot of Pat. The effect was spectacular. She had an over-all tan from a sun lamp she kept in her room stood out against her golden brown skin in startling contrast. You could see Pat's pelvic bulge and it looked as if a quick move might burst the halter and spill golden tan breasts all to hell and gone.
"Are you coming down later?" Pat asked, still looking at Tina with that calculating shrewdness.
"Who knows?" Tina pushed herself away from the door. Her knees were no longer weak and the tension in her stomach had eased slightly. Pat and Jean left her alone. She contorted her body to reach the zipper at the back of her skirt and skinned out of it. Her panties were still in the other room somewhere and she was nude except for a lacy bra. She slipped the straps over her shoulder, turned the bra to get at the snap and rubbed her lower breasts where the bra had made dents in her skin. Tensions gone, she felt let down, depressed. She thought about taking a bath, said to hell with it, and used a wash cloth to make necessary repairs. She threw herself down across one of the double beds.
She knew that she should join the others on the beach before she went into one of her black moods. It happened quite often, those all-encompassing doldrums which made the whole world gray and uninteresting. It happened most often after still another unsuccessful attempt to find the key to that terrible force which, when it came on her, took total possession of her, body and soul. She felt no guilt about the quickie intercourse in the adjoining room. Guilt had long since faded. She felt only disappointment, frustration. For Tina Franklin was different from other girls.
Other girls apparently didn't get worked up the way she did. There was something in her, something wrong with her body, perhaps, which made her crazy with need when she went two or three days without a man. She would go to classes and sit with her legs crossed and she'd think about it and get tremendously excited. By tensing her thigh muscles, she could put golden pressure on sensitive nerve ends and then she'd forget all about the lecture and the thirty or forty people in the classroom with her and dream about how good it would be when she finally found the right man. Somewhere there was a man who would make it la good for her. She knew that. It had to be true, otherwise there wasn't any use in going on. Otherwise there was no use at all in trying one man after the other, looking, looking. If she couldn't believe that there was a Mr. Right for her somewhere, she didn't care to go on living. To think of living the rest of her life in a hell of frustration, reaching but not attaining, was unbearable. And she'd been looking so long!
When Tina was twelve years old she was as developed as the average fifteen year old. She had a small body with hips just beginning to form, breasts which were small but firm and taut and making a respectable bulge in her bra. Her mother worked in an office. When her mother's cousin's son came to spend a week with them, Tina and the seventeen-year-old boy were often alone in the apartment with both of Tina's parents away at their jobs.
One day it was raining. The sky was dark, gray. The rain was a steady fall of monotonous sound. Her parents wouldn't be home for hours. She was bored, cooped up in the apartment with the second cousin who lounged in a chair reading a book. She was sitting on the rug in front of the TV set wishing that it would stop raining so that she could go outside. She sighed with boredom and he put his book down.
"Do you want to have some fun?" he asked, sitting down beside her, not looking at her face.
"Doing what?"
"Oh, just fooling around," he said. His voice was funny.
"Fooling around doing what?"
"Want me to show you?"
She was wearing shorts and a blouse. He put his hands out and opened the top button of her blouse.
"What are you doing?" She felt nothing but curiosity. She had experienced strange feelings before, but she didn't feel anything with her second cousin at first. Sometimes in bed at night, or in the bathtub with her strong, lithe body covered with soap, she'd touch herself. She could cup her growing breasts and like the feeling it gave her. She would put her hand in her lap and feel an urge to tense her body and press down.
"We're just going to fool around a little bit," he said, undoing the second button. She looked down at his hands. They were shaking. She didn't stop him. She was just very curious about why his voice was sounding so funny and why his hands were shaking. She let him unhook her bra and drop it away. He put the tips of his fingers on her growing breasts. She looked down and saw his hand, big and firm, cup her breast. She didn't stop him. Then her curiosity began to be replaced with another feeling, a deep seated wanting which she couldn't identify, which she didn't know how to answer. It was quite delicious as he touched her breasts with his fingers and cupped them with his hands.
When he stopped playing with her breasts and began to remove her shorts, she still didn't stop him. He pulled away her panties and touched her there and the unfamiliar feeling was so strong in her that she didn't know what was happening. She lay on the rug and he touched her all over and she was so excited that she wished something good would happen but the feeling just went on and on as he touched her and played with her.
He opened his clothing and put her hand on him. She felt as if every breath she took were fire. Her heart was pounding. He couldn't have known how much she wanted something, or else he would have taken her right then. He could have. She would have made no objection to having actual intercourse, she felt so strange and so good, but he just fondled her and made her touch him. Then he went into the bathroom and stayed a long time. She put on her clothes and was very tense and nervous. The next day they did it again. He touched her all over and she touched him and again she felt that wonderful, terrible feeling of wanting. It was like that every day for a week, until the seventeen-year-old second cousin went home.
When she started school that fall, there was a boy who teased her. He would pinch her and push her. She knew that he liked her. One day she asked the boy if he could go home with her. In her apartment, she undressed and told the boy how to touch her all over. The next day he said that one of his friends wanted to come over to her house and then the two of them touched her. She got naked for them and felt that terrible need as she let them touch her and she touched both of them at once. They were so much smaller than her cousin, but they liked fooling around as much as he did. Tina didn't think there was anything very wrong with it, although she didn't speak about it to anyone. She just thought it was a lot of fun. She fooled around with three or four boys during the first few months of that school term.
Then one day, a high school boy stopped her as she came out of school.
"Want a ride, Tina?" He leaned across the front seat of his car and opened the door on her side. He was a nice looking boy, thin, with long black hair. He had a nice smile. She'd seen him around the neighborhood. She didn't see anything wrong with riding with him. He drove out of town, talking in a very friendly way.
"I hear you're a pretty hot number," he said, after stopping the car on a secluded dirt road near the lake.
"What do you mean?"
"I hear you like to fool around."
"Oh," she said, feeling little prickles of interest.
It was the first time she'd been kissed. He kissed her with his lips closed at first. She didn't think it was bad at all. She liked it. She liked the taste of his mouth. He'd been smoking. She resisted for only a few seconds when he tried to use his tongue. That feeling of wanting, that unknown, terribly wonderful force was building in her and she felt that his kiss was a part of the mystery. She took his tongue into her mouth and his body trembled just as her cousin's body had.
"Do you want to touch my breasts?" she asked, because that was a fun part of the game and all he was doing was kissing her.
He opened her clothes with nervous haste and instead of touching her, he put his head down and took one of her growing peaks into his mouth. The feeling was so good she squirmed. Her heart pounded.
"More room in the back seat," he said.
She nodded eagerly and climbed over the seat. He came after her and pressed her down onto the seat, his weight heavy on her, his manhood pressing into her lap, pushing against the place where those strange feelings concentrated. He took off her panties and touched her.
"Let me touch you." sighed Tina.
He was as big as her cousin and he was really hard. She fondled him for a moment as he kissed her breasts and then he pushed her back onto the seat, her dress wadded around her waist. He touched her with his fingers and then a new thing was added to the game. He touched her with his hardness. When it went in it didn't hurt at all. And it was so much nicer than just touching each other. She felt him large inside her and that feeling of wanting something quickened and grew and she felt as if her insides were made of rubber, stretching, until the tension was so great that something was going to burst. It went on and it was terribly wonderful and she found that she could make it feel better by moving her hips in rhythm with his. She felt as if she were going to explode. She was near something very good when he went into her softness with a final lunge and hard, rapid poundings. Then it was over. He left her floating in great need, almost crying with the feeling of wanting something.
By the next year she was community property. Boys spread the word about her and they were always after her. She was known to be ready and willing for anything. She opened her legs for them in cars, on blankets beside the lake, standing in dark places and a few times in her mother's apartment. She was an eager lay because she knew that as soon as they started to fondle her she would get that wonderful feeling. She went on accepting them into her body because she felt that next time, the very next time, something would happen and she would be able to break that tension which made her such an easy mark for any good-looking boy, but she was always left high and frustrated.
One day her mother caught her in bed with a boy in her. She had her legs thrown high, her rump pumping to meet the boy's lunges.
Her mother threw the boy out and beat her with a belt. After that she tried to stop, but she couldn't. She'd go a few days without it and all she could think about was next time, next time, when the tension broke, when that golden promise was fulfilled and then she'd be back to her old habits.
Her father found out about it when he heard a couple of boys talking about that "hot piece, Tina Franklin". He sent her away to a girl's school. She was there only two weeks before she discovered a way to sneak out to meet the middle-aged night-watchman on the campus. She would meet him in the thickness of the landscaped garden and he'd put her down on the grass and she'd take off her pajamas and feel the damp, fresh grass on her back and feel his manliness slide into waiting promise and try and try and try. When she knew that he wasn't the one who had the key, she threatened to tell the school authorities that he'd been having intercourse with her unless he let her off the grounds at night. She went out two or three nights a week. She was on an older man kick then, thinking that a man with the experience of years might do for her what no boy had ever done. She found them in cars, in theaters, in front of bars.
Because, damn it, her body promised her something, something wonderful, something which, when she found it, would stop the aching need, the quivering muscles, the painful gasping breaths and the pounding heart. Others found it. She knew that. When she went to the university she had been four years in a school for rebellious girls. They all talked about sex at the private school, so she thought it natural for Pat Emory to talk about it. Pat told her about the glory of climax and it made Tina sad. If Pat could get such a wonderful feeling so easily, what was wrong with her that she couldn't?
Tina lay across a bed in the motel room at
Lundy Beach and heard the boys moving around in the next room. She hoped that David and Tom Jack would go to the beach and leave Ernie to come to her. She was nude and ready for him. He could walk in the door and there'd she be, on the bed, lying spread-eagled for him, no preliminaries needed, burning with desire just thinking about it. She felt that if they had the right time and the right place, the right atmosphere, she might be able to reach that unattainable peak of ecstasy with Ernie. If only he'd come to her. She needed him so badly. She wanted him in her, wanted to feel his hardness and his tight muscles and his straining body. She heard someone go out and she waited. No one came. She padded to the door between the room and looked in. The room was empty. She was angry, betrayed. He had had his. Couldn't he have the decency to come and try to give her something in return?
She went into the bathroom of the boys' room and fished a beer out of the ice in the tub. It wasn't cold, but she downed half of it at a gulp, snagged another to drink while she brushed her hair and pulled on a sensible, one-piece bathing suit.