Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“I meant you put it in me.”

“So what? If I didn’t come ...”

“Men dribble.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“They do.”

“Okay. Okay, fine.”

“It takes only one sperm to...”

“Forget it.”

“It does. And four days is very late.”

“Okay. I said okay, so okay, the hell with it.”

“It’s not you who’d have to march around with a big fucking belly for nine months.”

“You don’t know you’re pregnant, it’s only been...”

“It’s not you who’d have to give up everything to take care of a goddamn runny-nosed...”

“Oh, shit, here we go again.”

“Yes, here we go again, you bastard. If you made me pregnant...”

“Yes, what? What if I made you pregnant?”

“I’d hate you,” she said.

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You already do, don’t you?”

She did not answer him. She went into the bathroom instead, and in a little while he heard the shower running. He took his cock in his hand.

In his fantasy, Lynda was wearing black panties, black garter belt, black nylon stockings and black patent-leather, high-heeled shoes. She refused to take off the panties, refused even to allow his caressing hand inside them until the thin fabric covering her crotch was wet with her own juices. Only then did she permit him to ease the panties down over her rounded belly and the flat reddish-brown triangle of her pubic hair, her hips raised to accommodate him, past her thighs and knees, the nylon crackling over the nylon of her stockings, she herself finally pedaling the panties over her shins and kicking them off her ankles and her feet.

In his fantasy, she positioned herself so that her mouth was just above him, and then relentlessly sucked him till he was begging her to make him come. She smiled knowingly and took her questing mouth from him, her unmoving fingers tight around his cock, a ring of flesh that refused either retreat or release, the erection stubbornly maintained, the orgasm denied. She straddled him then and rode him furiously, her breasts bobbing wildly, and then uncannily stopped just as he was about to come, leaning forward to kiss him on the mouth, her breasts flattening against his chest, her cunt as motionless as death, his cock still impaling her, pulsing inside her, his little death denied, the juices subsiding inside his shaft like a thin line of mercury in a thermometer. She started again almost at once, bringing him again to the edge of orgasm, her witch’s instinct telling her when to stop, and start again, and stop again, each time just as he was almost there, almost, almost, not a word spoken, knowing each time, achieving the effect if not the reality of orgasm with each aborted rush of semen to the base of his shaft.

And then, in his fantasy, she whispered, “Tell me what to say in English,” and he said, “Say fuck me,” and she repeated the words, “Fuck me,” softly at first, whispering them, “Fuck me,” and then more loudly, “Fuck me,” and finally allowed him to burst inside her, “Fuck me, oh, fuck me,” her own screaming orgasm drowning the roar of his blood, his cock mindlessly spurting.

In the bathroom, the shower was still running.

The boys had built a huge bonfire on the sand, digging a hole first and leaving the displaced sand around it in a circle, to facilitate smothering the embers later on. At 3:00 P.M., the day was still suffocatingly hot, and so the kids stayed in the water for at least another half-hour, and then came out onto the sand and briskly toweled themselves by the fire. One of the girls had been swimming without a top; Lissie found this daring and in fact a bit sluttish, and was happy to see her putting on a T-shirt now.

The boys had brought along the hot dogs and the beer, and the girls had contributed all the rest of the food, the way the girls in Rutledge did whenever there was a picnic. Lissie herself had made the potato salad, using a recipe her grandmother had provided, and she was pleased to see that it disappeared almost at once. The girl who’d been swimming topless had made a jelly mold that lost the vote, but the girl folksinger had baked a carrot cake that was positively the most delicious thing Lissie had ever tasted. Everybody kept saying she should go into business. The girl’s name was Patty, and when Warren suggested that she call her enterprise “Patty Cakes,” he actually got a round of applause.

They sat around the fire on blankets afterward, drinking beer and smoking pot. Warren put his arm around her. She hoped he wouldn’t try to kiss her or anything, especially in broad daylight. In all her seventeen years, she’d kissed only four boys, the last of whom had been a kid named Alex Bowles, who’d kissed her openmouthed behind the ice-hockey rink at Henderson State Penitentiary and then immediately began fumbling inside her blouse for her minuscule breasts, scaring her half out of her wits. Her mother kept telling her she was very young for her age. Lissie supposed she was — maybe — but she didn’t like being told she was immature, which was what her mother was saying despite the euphemism.

It was Pete Turner, the boy from Princeton, who started talking about what had happened at Chappaquiddick, over on the Vineyard, the day before. Well, actually, it had happened two nights ago, but yesterday was when all the papers printed the story, and everybody on the Cape seemed to be talking about nothing else. In fact, Lissie had been surprised last night, when her parents finally called from Sardinia, to discover they knew nothing at all about it. She’d read them the story from the Boston Globe, at transatlantic telephone rates, and her father said only, “Something, huh?” There had been the sound of music in the background, and both her parents had sounded very, very distant.

Pete wanted to know what everybody else in America wanted to know: Why the hell had Kennedy driven over that bridge to begin with? “Let’s say it’s true he was taking her to catch the ferry to Edgartown, okay?” he said. “Then why...?”

“What was her name, anyway?” one of the girls said.

“Mary something.”

“Mary Jo.”

“A Polish name.”

“Kapachnik or something.”

“Kopechne,” Warren said.

“Never mind why he drove over the bridge,” one of the other boys said. “What I want to know is what they were doing at that party.”

“Well, what do you think they were doing?” Pete said.

“He was probably stoned,” one of the girls ventured.

“No question,” Patty said.

“The road to the ferry was a main road,” Pete said.

“Black-topped,” another boy said.

“So why’d he make a right turn toward the bridge?”

“He was probably taking her to the beach,” Patty said.

“Give her a little Kennedy shtup,” one of the boys said.

“They’re famous for that, the Kennedys.”

“Who says?” Lissie asked.

“Oh, come on, John Kennedy was fucking around all the while he was in the White House.”

“You don’t know that for a fact,” Warren said.

“They all do,” somebody else said, “ all the presidents. That’s the part of history they never tell us about.”

“Well, they told us about Harding. Harding had a mistress, didn’t he?”

“Oh, sure. But only after he was long dead.”

“How can you have a mistress after you’re long dead?” someone asked, and everyone laughed.

“My mother’s maiden name was Harding,” Lissie said, and realized at once how inappropriate her comment had been.

“Kennedy was the worst of them all,” Pete said, ignoring her. “He used to send a limo to pick up this actress who was working Off Broadway.”