HE WENT TO HER IN THE NIGHT, sporting a blue hooded sweatshirt that didn't quite cover the tufts of dark blonde hair spilling down over his eyes, leaping out his second story window and landing smooth and agile like a cat on the wet grass with a poof. Across the little backyard lawn to the neighbors house a cat hurried for safety, scampering and clawing through the strawberry bushes on the edge of the property.
Ben snuck slowly around the perimeter of his house, staying in the shadows and avoiding the long flush cast by the infringing streetlamps. From the corner he looked back to his house glowing across the lawn, the little figures moving inside the window waving their wine glasses and laughing and slapping their hands against his mother's old wooden furniture. Before he left he had checked the cabinet in the basement where the wines were kept. He knew that he would not be missed.
He took a moment to calm himself. From where he stood their irrelevancies seemed more evident than ever. It was not that he did not like the people inside of the house. Some of the people inside he liked very much. His two best friends Maria and Carl, his aunts and uncles and his little cousin, his mother, his father. Even some of the others were not so very bad, before they had their drinks in them. But from where he stood their faults were magnified. He cared little for the promise of the bottoms of beer bottles and the empty wine glasses that their various coffee tables would accrue over the night. He tired of the way each 'party' or gathering or celebration of any kind with his friends and family always seemed to end -- sitting around in the halfglow of the moonlight coming in through the twisted shades, counting the night's unfulfilled promises, bemoaning again and again the unfairness of it all with whoever was still awake, watching them all one by one retiring to the rest that he did not crave, until he was left to greet the morning's pale light, and the haunting realism which it brought, alone.
This was not how he had always imagined his life. That world of lost hope and beer-soaked napkins and hollow stomachs was beginning to weigh heavily on his shoulders. Always there was something more just out of his reach on the horizon, the promise of the good and the meaningful which slipped away like the ghosts that they were, endless illusions and delusions provided by a world that built its very foundations in deceit.
Life in between each major social gathering, ever since he had finished college, seemed like nothing more than extraneous filler, nothing but the ungraceful, even disgraceful grunt work done so that a few moments spare leisure could be possible come the weekends. He did not want to live from empty party to empty party, from one coffee table of downed booze to the next. He was sick of the feeling of elasticity that had enveloped him, sick of how he had bent and twisted himself in so many directions in an effort to fit in and be happy in this lifestyle of "adulthood" that was foreign and unfamiliar and cold to him. There was something more for him, he knew. Something better. His life was not meant to be this way. He needed to find something to snap him out of it. He just never thought he would find it under Evelyn Lethario's American Eagle skirt.
Evelyn was Maria's "little" sister. Maria and Ben had been best friends for years. Things between them had never progressed beyond friendship. They helped each other date and Maria was Ben's wingman when they went out to the bars -- an experiment which ended with a desirable result very infrequently. Because they had been friends for so long their families were very close, and the gathering in Ben's living room was comprised not only of Maria, but of Mr. and Mrs. Lethario themselves, along with a few of their other friends.
As he wandered down the empty neighborhood street, a few houses buzzing with that nostalgic frenzy of any weekend summer night, the children still off chasing each other through the hedgerows in the throes of a careless bliss they were too young to understand, Ben began to tingle. His mind was racing with the promise of the night ahead of him. Suddenly he was buying into it all again, the hot breeze and the smell of a barbeque which it carried on its coattails, the warmth of the humid air on his cold air-conditioned skin, the way the darkness just beyond each lamppost seemed to beckon in its mystery and the endless possibility of what the unknown could hold.
His nerves were on fire. All week he had been letting his mouth water in anticipation of her mouth on him. Sometimes it hit him at odd moments throughout the day, when he was performing mundane tasks. He would suddenly stop and think: my God, I'm going to get my penis sucked by a beautiful girl. Time would pass. Concentration would wane and easy tasks would become impossible. It was never sex that he imagined in these daydreams. He could not think that far ahead. It had been too long. The possibility of a collision between his groin and hers was foreign to him; unmanageable, unthinkable. Her mouth, that was something real. The taste of saliva. The warmth and the softness of a girl's red lips. Things that come in waves and crests and peaks and valleys of intensity but which throughout all of his time a man or a boy never does forget.
Maria was cute, but Evelyn had a sex appeal which her older sister could only dream of. Part of it was in her style: Maria often wore long t-shirts and baggy sweatpants while in the house, and meanwhile Evelyn would be bouncing around the house in tight-shorts and a low-cut tanktop that demanded to be torn off. Her eyes were wide and alluring, her stature short but firm, hard, curvaceous. When she bent over the desk to reach for her phone, her shorts would ride slightly up her ass, displaying a wonderful stretch of slappable, kissable flesh that Ben just wanted to take a firm hold of while pounding her from behind.
There was something Pacific Islander in the Lethario lineage, just enough so that both Maria and Evelyn had slightly darker skin that tanned magnificently and made them angels of the summer. Ben thought of himself as a good guy, but he had lost track of the number of times that he had jerked off to thoughts of Evelyn and Maria. Yet he often thought that he included Maria in the fantasy only so that he would not feel uncomfortable about taking the flower of her younger sister. When he really needed to get himself off, it would be thoughts of Evelyn naked. Thoughts of Evelyn straddling him with her strong thighs, squeezing him tight, him ravaging her chest and ripping off every scrap of tantalizing clothing she had ever worn just to get at the prized girlflesh beneath that had been for so long hidden to him. And never once did he say anything, try anything, do anything. He was unfailingly polite and even slightly shy.
But there was a reason that Maria was Ben's best friend. She was far less materialistic, not at all fashion-oriented, could never be seen as slutty, read books and had an engaging personality that made her far from shallow, and all in all was not nearly as shameless as her younger sister. Evelyn kissed a dozen boys in high school, and Ben heard tales from Maria of her handjob escapades in the mall bathroom during the midst of an Abercrombie shopping spree. Everything about Evelyn offered to him the opposite of what he wanted out of a girl. She was the type of girl, young and silly and snappy and rude, that someone like Ben could never get along with.
***
But then everything changed.
It had all come about a week earlier, at the party which his family and the Letharios had jointly thrown, billing it as Ben's college graduation and Evelyn's high school graduation. Ben walked "accidentally" into the small, thickened grove of the two apple trees which grew on his front lawn. He wanted a moment's peace from the enormous throng of halfstrangers who congratulated him on studying himself into ten years worth of debt.
When he entered he saw Evelyn, leaning against one of the trees, a bright red juicy apple in her mouth, her other hand working furiously at a text message on her phone. He swallowed nervously at her -- he knew the instant he saw her that would never forget the way she looked that day. He could never forget the way she looked in that short white dress, spotted with pink flowers. The way her legs positively glowed beneath the welcoming sunshine. The way her forehead was sweaty and her eyes heavy with summer lust. The way her breasts pressed against the top line of her dress, which was cut short enough to display delectably fleshy thighs that had been running through his mind every time he needed to relieve himself of burning sexual energy.
Everything about the image was picture-perfect.
"Hey," Ben said.
"Listen," Evelyn said. "I know you hate me and all."
"What?"
"You don't?"
"Of course I don't. You just, er, represent a lot of things that I hate."
She laughed curtly, flashing him a white-toothed grin, her lips wet with the moisture of the apple. Ben suddenly became conscious of the sweat on his hands, of something in his khakis growing slightly larger.
"Uh, good one. You look so awkward out there, Schmidt."
She licked her finger.
"I just don't see all this nonsense as a reward. And I don't see graduating college as something worth rewarding."
