Lawrence Block: No Score

I went on telling her this, leaving out those two flaws (only the first of which I knew about then) and wording my praise so that I came off more like an artist and less like a total sex maniac, and all the while I kept looking at her eyes, and the weirdest thing happened. She began to get hypnotized.

I don’t know what else you could call it. She was nodding encouragingly in time to the rhythm of my words, and every now and then she would chime in with Do you really think so? or Do you honestly mean it? or just a little Yes and Uh-huh and Oh sounds and grunts, and it was as if she was completely caught up in the sound of my voice telling her how perfect she was. I was pressing her hand as I talked and she was giving me little rhythmic squeezes in return.

You’ve got her, I thought. Now hurry, before the spell wears off.

But I guess I was afraid to blow it. Things were going so well, see, and I didn’t want to jeopardize my position. Because it seemed as though I had been waiting forever for this to happen, and if it didn’t happen soon I didn’t know what I would do, except maybe go completely out of my head.

So I went on talking while the cigarette burned unattended between the fingers of her left hand — I was holding the right hand all the while. And very smoothly I went on talking and reached across and plucked the cigarette away and flipped it into the sink on the other side of the room. It was an easy shot because the other side of the room wasn’t all that far away, the room being on the small side, but even so the whole maneuver was one of my smoother plays.

It encouraged me, and then, too, I realized that soon I was going to run out of parts of Francine to praise. So I got an arm around her and tipped up her face and kissed her.

At first it was like kissing — well, I was going to say a warm corpse, but that’s really pretty revolting and it wasn’t like that at all. Let’s say it was like kissing someone who was asleep.

But then she started to wake up.

She kissed back, sort of tentatively, and I held her a little closer and kissed her a little more heavily, and she opened up like a flower. Her arms went around me and held me and her breasts pressed up against my chest and she sighed beautifully and her lips parted. There was a brief hissing sound as some drops from the leaky faucet put out her cigarette butt, and as the hissing died I let my tongue slip ever so gingerly past her lips and into the rich dark cave of her mouth.

She tasted of honey and tobacco and musk. She made the kiss a very urgent and hungry sort of experience, putting her own mouth into it and clutching my shoulders fiercely with her little hands.

First base, I thought.

I told myself to forget about the different bases, because that sort of thinking can be a trap. I had been to first base before, though not with Francine. I had been to second base a few times, and even to third base.

But, as you must have figured out by now, I had never been to home plate.

All right. Let’s come right down and say it, let’s put it down in black and white. I was a virgin.

What a stupid word.

I mean, it’s a girl’s word, right? Virgin, for Pete’s sake. You really can’t come up with a more feminine word than virgin. You hear a word like that and you picture a girl with flowers in her hair, wearing something with ruffles. But I don’t know of any other word for it, so that one will have to do. I, Chip Harrison, was a seventeen-year-old virgin. I wasn’t going to be seventeen forever. (Although there were times when it seemed that way.) And I wasn’t going to be a virgin forever, either, if I could help it. (Although there were times, damn it, when it didn’t seem as though I could help it.)

As a matter of fact, it sort of seemed to me that the two things, age and sex, were connected in some heavy way. That if I scored (which is to say got to home plate, which is to say stopped being a virgin) before I turned eighteen, then I won. Whereas if I didn’t, I lost.

But the point of all this is that the business with the bases can be a snare and a delusion, or at least I have found this to be so, because they give you the feeling that you are making progress with the girl, in that each time you are with her you get a little closer to the goal line (wrong sport, sorry about that) and thus it seems to follow that sooner or later you will score. This is not necessarily true. And, in fact, it seems that the more you get into this kind of pattern with a girl, the better she gets at getting you to stop somewhere along the way. It isn’t that you keep getting closer but that you keep not getting where you wanted to go, and all of this is not only frustrating (very) but it leaves her knowing that she can control you, and this is not a Good Thing in any sense.

Not that I am the World’s Foremost Authority on all this. To be honest, some of this I got from the books on how to succeed with women, and some is just speculation on my part. But what it all boils down to is that the best way to do something is to do it, and the best way to Go All The Way with a girl is to just go ahead and do it. Not in stages but all at once.

Especially because, in this particular instance, I was not going to get another chance at Francine. Because she was two years older than I was, and practically engaged to some college jerk, and so it had been a case of wild luck that I had gotten her to my room at all. So the chances were very good that I would never see her again, which was too bad, but which was something I could life with. If Only. If only I hit the first pitch completely out of the park and ran around the bases and crossed the plate before Francine realized what had happened.

So we held the kiss, and she clung to me as tightly as her sweater clung to her, and my tongue went spelunking in her mouth, and her tongue met it and got acquainted with it. We kissed for a long time. Then we came up for air and looked deep into each other’s eyes, and when her eyes went slightly glassy I kissed her again, and it was the same, only better.

When we broke this time she said, “Oh, Chip—”

“Francine—”

“I must go.”

“Francine—”

“Please, I can’t—”

“You’re so beautiful,” I said, desperately.

“Oh, Chip.”

“I love to kiss you.”

“Oh.”

“So beautiful. A goddess.”

“Oh, my God—”

I drew her to me. She resisted, but not in any really meaningful way. She sort of stiffened, and I drew her close and got my mouth fastened to hers again, and then she got into the spirit of things again, as if the token show of resistance made it all right for her to surrender now. And in the course of drawing her close, somehow or other my hand managed to get on top of her breast.

Around first base and streaking for second.

Getting the sweater off was an absolute stone bitch. It really was. I guess because there is no entirely natural way to pull a tight yellow sweater over a girl’s head. You can’t just make believe it’s happening by itself. It’s possible to sort of slide into a kiss, or let your hands accidentally settle on the more interesting parts of a girl, but sweater removal is just too damned obvious. Even if you’re both all in favor of it, it’s hard to pretend you don’t know what’s going on. Or coming off, I suppose.

I got the sweater out of the waistband of her skirt without too much trouble. But then I started to work one hand up under the front of the sweater, and she broke the kiss and put her hand on mine, and pushed.

“Please, Chip.”

“Francine, you’re so beautiful.”

“Chip, I don’t want you to do that.”

“I think you have the most beautiful breasts in the world.”