Free Gringa by Sandra Scofield Page B

pulled the bra out with his right and handed it to me. “Put it in your purse, honey,” he murmured. He got out of the car and pissed right by the door. I watched him shake himself dry.
    When he got back in he patted me on the arm and said, “S’aright.” He started the car and gunned the motor a couple of times. “I guess I figgered wrong,” he said. “You looked to me like—” He turned the car off again. “Damn it, you looked like a girl who’d like it. Do you?” At least he hadn’t said, a girl who’d do it. I didn’t have an answer. He leaned over and slid a hand up under my skirt very fast. I twisted away a bit and he snapped, “Be still!” I complied. His hand went straight up my legs like a snake until it bumped against my underwear. Briskly, he worked his hand beneath the nylon and thrust a finger inside me. I jumped, astonished, but he held on, not doing anything with his finger, simply being there, a stationary object. I felt myself pulsing, closing wet and slick around his finger, I felt the finger drawing from me, sucking me into his flesh. As abruptly as he had intruded, he pulled out. He made a big show of wiping his finger on his pants. “I thought maybe you were just teasing me,” he said. “Playing games with ole Farin. But shit, you want it and don’t know what it is! You got my timing all off, I had you figgered wrong. Then it was too late to slack off and go slow. But you ain’t lying. If you knew what it felt like, you wouldn’t be able to say no.” He adjusted his Levis around his crotch. “You got a sticky cunt,” he grinned. He burned rubber pulling away. In front of my house, he leaned across me and opened the door on my side. “See you around,” he said. As I got out, he slapped at my buttocks. “When you’re ready!” he laughed.
    After that I knew what to expect, and I knew I wasn’t, in Farin’s terms, “ready.” I went out because I was lonely and because I would take what there was, but I wasn’t going to lie down for some ducktailed conceited dumb boy who asked me out because he couldn’t think of any other girl. They rolled up the sleeves of their tee-shirts, these boys; they belched their beer and couldn’t think of anything at all to ask me about myself. My dates were a joke, slow and boring, but I couldn’t say, “Skip the movie, let’s go park.” They would never have believed me when I drew the line. Once we were in the dark, and I closed my eyes, I forgot who the boy was, and it was hard to stop in time. I loved the sly journey up my leg, a boy’s hand moving so slow. I longed for the finger inside me, the spasms it brought on. I remembered Natalie at twelve, with Kermit, and I struck her bargain with these boys: I would touch them and they could touch me. As for the rest of it, I said, “My brother would kill me.” Kermit was no big slugger, but he was older, out of school, and it called on some sort of respect when I said that. “Sure, whatever you say,” they said. There were three, then four of them, coming back every two or three weeks, seldom overlapping their calls. I thought maybe they got together and made a calendar for me, but this was so terrible a thing to consider I told myself I was being silly.
    One of the boys told me I was giving him blue balls, he was going to die. I said I’d made it clear from the beginning, he knew what was coming and what was not. When he didn’t push me any further, slumping down in the seat in a pitiable pose, I remembered what Farin had done, and I offered a little more, just that one time, for that one boy, but I was kidding myself.
    The others began to ache and complain, saying they didn’t have that much self-control, they were horny for sweet chrissake; they made it sound like I was so pretty and sexy, they fell down a dark deep sweet hole