Free Kinflicks by Lisa Alther Page B

them both into the back. We embraced and, for the first time, felt the delicious warmth of our bare chests joined, his bulging pectoral muscles dwarfing my breasts into obscurity without the assistance of my Never-Tell. A feathery arrow of pubic hair ran down his firm stomach to his navel and disappeared tantalizingly behind his belt. We leaned apart so that my stiffening nipples just touched his chest, and then moved sideways in opposite directions, playfully, so that my nipples brushed his chest and got tangled up in his mat of blond hair.
    Then slowly, cautiously, expecting to be stopped, he slid his famous catching hand up under the leg of my gray twill shorts, while his equally fabled pitching hand pulled me tightly to him. His fingers sallied forth into the mysterious folds of the dampening nylon crotch of my panties and dallied there with feigned casualness. Then, in one of the lightening-quick plays he was so renowned for on the athletic fields, one of his fingers skirted the elastic and buried itself in me like Jack Horner’s thumb in a Christmas pudding.
    We both sat immobile, startled by the success of his venture and uncertain of the next way station in our journey together toward the Golgotha of sexual intercourse. We looked at each other, perplexed. With my middle finger, I twirled Joe Bob’s ring, the token of my continued respectability, on my thumb.
    We sat motionless for a couple of minutes, uncertain of how to disentangle ourselves and proceed, just as we had sat with interminably interlocked hands that first night at the Family Drive-In. He couldn’t remove his finger because he didn’t want to yield any yardage gained. On the other hand, he didn’t know exactly what to do with the finger now that it had achieved its much-vaunted destination. He wiggled it tentatively. I smiled fondly at him, as much in the dark as he. He finally leaned his head over and simultaneously sucked a nipple and ground his finger around in me for a while.
    Nor did I know where to position my hands for maximum effect. Displaying a woeful lack of imagination, I tried putting one on his hand in my crotch. With my other hand I caressed his bristly head. Without looking up, he took my hand, the one on his, and placed it on the lump of his fly, which lump I had by now astutely concluded was not a hernia after all, but was rather something infinitely more integral to our undertaking.
    He stopped sucking long enough to gasp, “Rub it!” Delighted to have an apparently meaningful task to perform, I devoted all my heretofore-unchanneled enthusiasm to rubbing the lump, like Aladdin his lamp. By now our various limbs were tangled up like the Laocoon in my Latin II textbook; but rather than being frozen in stone for all eternity, the frieze composed of Joe Bob and me sprawled panting across the front seat of Sparkplug was heaving and trembling and shuddering.
    Suddenly Joe Bob sat bolt upright, his finger popping out of me like a cork out of a champagne bottle; the elastic of my pants leg snapped with nearly enough force to sever my femoral artery. The hard lump under my hand was going all soft and squishy.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” I asked in horror. “Have I done something wrong?’
    â€œTrainin’!” Joe Bob moaned, looking at his watch. “Coach’ll kill me! It’s almost eleven!”
    I pictured him turning into a medicine ball at the stroke of eleven. “How would Coach know?” I asked, starting to feel faintly resentful.
    â€œHe cruises our houses to see if our cars are in and our bedroom lights off,” he gasped, pulling on his shirt and strapping on his wrist weights.
    â€œWhat will he do to you?”
    â€œHe might take me off the startin’ line-up for the next game,” he said grimly, throwing Sparkplug into reverse and scratching out backwards as I scrambled into my Never-Tell.
    â€œHe couldn’t. You’re the star.”
    He shifted into