Lawrence Block - No Score

Somebody handed me the bottle. I knew what I was doing this time, but all the same I took a drink. Just a short one, though. Not that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I knew I would be able to do anything I wanted to do. But what worried me was that I might be like Flickinger and have a blackout. If I finally got laid after all this time and then couldn’t even remember it, for Pete’s sake, I might as well kill myself.

I wondered if Flickinger would remember. Maybe he just forgot telling stories to people. I looked around to make sure he was okay. He was conscious now, but his breath was coming along pretty raggedly.

While Keegan gave her a slow rhythmic banging, the rest of us somehow automatically started taking off our own clothes. We didn’t say anything but just did this. I suppose the idea was that we were getting ready so that no time would be lost, but it didn’t make any real sense for me, for example, to be in such a mad rush to get out of my clothes when there were still four men who were going to have her before my turn came.

What it was, I suppose, was that we were all knocked out enough by the heat and the air conditioning and the sexual excitement of the scene that the usual inhibitions were gone and the raunchier the whole evening got, the better we were going to like it.

When I thought about it later, for example, I couldn’t remember anyone actually saying that we would stand around watching while each of us took a turn with Cherry. This was never put into words, and yet once things got into gear, we all more or less took it for granted that that was how it would go. Normally I would have found that idea a little off-putting. I would have gone along with it, maybe, but I would have at least questioned it a little. You would think it would just be more natural for a group of men to want to make it with the girl in private rather than as part of a group thing. Maybe we all wanted to watch each other with Cherry, and maybe we wanted to be watched, but it took the special mood of the evening for all of this to come into the open and to be taken so completely for granted by all six of us.

Keegan suddenly increased the pace, and we were all sort of nodding along in rhythm with him as he hit his stride and finished. He was no sooner out than Jimmy Joe was in his place, all hunched up over Cherry so that he could nibble at her breasts as he humped away at her. I got a look at her face. Her eyes were half lidded and her jaw was slack, and she was drooling a little bit out of the corner of her mouth. That was about the extent of her participation in what was going on. She didn’t even move very much, just giving her behind a slight wiggle every once in a while, maybe to prove to us that she hadn’t gone and died somewhere along the way.

Jimmy Joe didn’t last very long. After just a few seconds he started cursing his head off as he gave a last thrust and came. He was swearing all the way through, and he went on swearing after he withdrew, and he walked all the way across the room still cursing under his breath.

“Hey,” Keegan said, pleasantly, “why don’t you put a sock in it, huh? Pipe down.”

“Goddamn sonofabitching—”

“Happens to everybody,” Keegan said.

“What a time to turn into a rabbit.”

“You got excited,” I said. The world’s foremost authority, Chip Harrison, passing out free advice. “You’ll feel easier the second time around.”

“Or the third,” Keegan said.

Jimmy Joe stopped swearing. Lester was taking his turn, not lying on top of her but standing with his feet on the floor. Maybe all those hours in bus station toilets had him thinking he had to be on his feet to enjoy sex. He had Cherry arranged so that her legs hung over the edge of the bed, and then he picked up her feet and doubled them up with her knees deeply bent, and then he bent over her and got down to brass tacks. It was an interesting position and the rest of us commented on its fine points, like sportsmen checking out a Thoroughbred racehorse.

“He’s really getting in that way,” Solly noted. “You double ’em up that way, you can just about tickle their tonsils.”

Someone else said he preferred to do his work lying down, and the discussion moved along, and Lester turned his head and told us to shut up, managing to do this without missing a beat.

But I noticed something about Cherry. She was starting to get interested in what was happening. Lester had told me this would happen, but I didn’t really believe him. It was true, though. There were loads of sweat on her forehead and upper lip now, and between her breasts. She was breathing hard, and her hips were bucking and twitching, and after all the time she had spent just lying there, she was gradually getting into the mood in a big way.

Which meant I was the lucky one, I thought, reaching for the bottle and knocking back another drink. I mean, they were just getting her ready for me. I was the one who was going to have the best time of it.

I guess her excitement had an effect on all of us. The talk gradually died down and stopped completely. The five of us watched in silence, eyes riveted to the two of them on the bed.

Lester finished. He dragged himself off the girl’s body and staggered over to the bathroom. Solly took his place and just stood there for a minute, looking down at the girl. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was waiting for, but I didn’t break the silence.

He sighed, then put a hand down and touched her between her legs.

She moaned. I guess it was the first sound I could remember hearing her make.

He lifted his hand and looked at it. “Soaking wet,” he said to himself. “Dripping, the little mink is dripping. And hot.”

Come on, I thought. Come on already.

He entered her slowly, very slowly, and she moaned again, a rippling moan that was unlike any sound I’d ever heard. I was a little worried now that Solly was going to be the lucky one to make her come. It was a pretty silly thing to worry about now that I think back on it, but at the time it seemed very important that I be the one to do this. So I stood there with my hands in fists, wishing that Solly would learn Jimmy Joe’s impersonation of a rabbit.

He worked slowly at first, in and out, very slowly, and my whole brain was filled up with the picture of the two of them rolling around on my bed, locked together in this slow thoughtful screw. If there’s anything that looks more ridiculous than people screwing, I don’t know what it is. I mean, if you stopped to think what you look like when you’re doing it, the facial expressions and the position and all, you might not feel as much like going through with it. They looked foolish, but they also looked as though what they were doing was a tremendous amount of fun.

Then bit by bit the tempo picked up, with each of them working at the same pace. She spoke for the first time, begging him to do it harder and faster. She talked nonstop, and she didn’t use more than five different words all in all, and three of them were obscene, which is a pretty good average if you spread it over a person’s whole vocabulary. She begged him to do it, and he did it, and she wrapped her legs around him and dug her nails into him and really let herself go, kicking and screaming her head off.

Solly gave a cross between a growl and a roar. He pitched forward on her the way Flick had done earlier. But Cherry didn’t stop kicking and screaming and wiggling her tail, as if she didn’t realize that the record was over. For a few seconds Solly just lay there being tossed around by her hips. Then he grunted and heaved himself up and away from her. She tried to hang on. He unhooked her arms from around his neck and dumped her on the bed.

“She don’t know when to quit,” he said to no one in particular. I started for her, but he was standing in the way, just shaking his head and saying that she was a crazy little broad who didn’t know when to quit.