My friend's sister, Ivy, had been trying to talk to me for months now, but would suddenly giggle and run away, leaving me feeling like I had my fly open or half a pie stuck to my face or something equally embarrassing. If she wasn't talking to me, she was staring at me, brown eyes boring into the back of my skull, only to look away when I turned around.
If I didn't know any better I would think she had a crush on me. Which was sweet, and highly inappropriate. I was well over twenty. She was only sixteen, and in the grip of puberty. I was surprised she's interested in me and not some celebrity, or boy more her age. When she grew older, and her hormones died down, she would forget about me and move onto someone else.
Time passed. Weeks turned into months; a year passed. She, um,
developed
. Body trimmed by time spent preparing for local dance competitions; her walk was smooth and feline, as her burgeoning breasts and hips drew the eye like lightning, and worst of all, she had two good friends that were unfortunately cut from the same cloth. As I entered the living room the former girlish chatter would suddenly stop, and three pairs of eyes would watch me as I walked across the living room to the kitchen, grab a cold glass of water, and wander back. As soon as I left the room, the voices would start up just as soon as I was around the corner. I thought nothing of it, after all, I was probably just as weird when I was that young.
As seventeen became eighteen, her mother worried about her lack of boyfriends. I would reply that sometimes it took some longer to sort themselves out than others. Following the lead of the women in music videos, her clothing became more provocative. Her mother and father disapproved, but only nagged her to put more clothes on as the communal laundry basket in the bathroom, across the hall from the washing room, started filling with thongs, and other skimpy panties not much more than the merest suggestion of lace or silk.
My friend was getting close to graduating, and mercifully, her ardor for me cooled and she found a boyfriend, a goofy looking kid with so much metal embedded in his face that I just wanted to run an electromagnet over it and see what popped off. Now, being a friend of the family for a while now, I was leery of her choice. He looked shifty, greasy, and entirely too untrustable, but I kept those thoughts to myself as her parents worried, drinking Maalox by the bucket when she skated out on a date with that angsty boy-band reject.
Time moved on. I stopped my friend from killing himself when his relationship dissolved with all the grace and style of a supernova. I cleaned him up, and kept him at my house that night, watching his chest rise and fall under the sheet, hoping that the next day I wouldn't have tell his family he was dead. It was a very long night, but his luck held, and the next morning he woke up looking like death warmed over, and we both tactfully agreed to never mention this to anyone.
Soon enough finals were over, and my friend held a party. All his friends and family were invited, and he held it at my apartment instead of his house, because, well, there could be alcohol there without parental repercussions. I blew some discretionary funds on a butt-load of alcohol and my friend decided to play bartender after his last brush with the sauce. The party was great, despite the fact I tend to live like a nomad, with little in the way of furniture that cannot be easily packed up. We even had a pool on the patio. Sure it was an inflated kiddy pool, but at ten feet by six feet by a foot and a half, it was large enough to need a lifeguard, which I did happily, in my swim trunks, and a floppy, wide brimmed hat with a rose stuck into the band, drinking my German lager and sneering down my nose at the American piss-water the others chose to swill. As the sun set and the gibbous moon rose high in the sky, I was feeling distinctly mellowed.
The sliding glass door opened with a squeak, and two long gorgeous legs pick their way through the bottle-strewn floor. "So, are you drunk enough yet?" Ivy called, and stepped into the pool. She had changed into a racing cut blue and white striped one-piece swimsuit that adhered tightly to her body like a second skin--and a very
thin
second skin at that.
My eyes roamed once, my lips cranked into a sly almost-smirk before I remembered who I was looking at, and snapped away to look at something less... embarrassing, like the wall.
Damn the beer
. "Not drunk. Quite yet. Buzzed though. Good buzz." I said with only a tiny slurring of the z's.
"So how are you doing?"
"Eh, s'allriiite."
"Heard you haven't had a girlfriend in a few years."
I looked at the bottle to not look at her. I paused, thinking slowly, "Eh, s'allriiite. How's the cylon?"
"Ronnie and I broke up a few days ago. He turned out to be a real jerk."
"Lotta that goin' 'round." I muttered darkly, draining the bottle and groping around the cooler beside me for a new one.
"Hey, get me one."
"You're not old enough."
"I'm old enough to smoke, get drafted, drive, married, have sex, and vote, and not drink?"
"Dem's the rules." I said, catching the bottle opener hanging from a string tied around my wrist and popping the top with a satisfying hiss.
"The rules suck."
"Yep." I said, tossing the bottle cap over my shoulder and off the patio.
"Rules written by desiccated white guys suck who got religion suck."
"Yep."
"So when's the last time you had sex?"
Aspirated lager flew the length of the patio.
"Shit, that long?"
I fixed her with the best quelling stare I could under the circumstances as I finished coughing. "That. Is not. Your business." I gasped.
"Aw, Owen's worried about you. My brother keeps saying that 'if that idiot doesn't get laid soon, he's going to explode'. From where, I leave up to you."
"How touching."
"So how long? Inquiring minds want to know!"
"Don't you have a curfew or something?"
"So defensive! It
has
been long then."
"Or I'm not willing to discuss my sex life, or lack thereof, with my best friend's little
sister
."
"Aw, I'm not so little anymore." She smiled mischievously, preening a little as I gave her a very old look.
"Best friend's younger sister, still."
"Aw, even mom's worried about you. Says you should find a nice girl to settle down with."
"Yep." I said, looking at the bottle. Trying not to let something as petty as my problems ruin a good buzz.
"Drunk yet?"
"Nope."
"What do you think of my swimsuit? The old one was too small. I think this one looks good."
I ran a professional eye over her as she stretched, hands above her head, feet pointed at the far wall, her breasts flattened against the suit, "Looks good." I said, drained the bottle, and looked away as I groped for a new one.
"You know why I broke up with Ronnie?"
"Nope."
"He became a total freak."
"It happens."
"All he could talk about was drugs, and ask me again and again to suck his dick. It was a nice dick. Five inches long, biggest I've ever seen in real life."
"It happens."
"All guys are horny freaks."
