Seeing Tommy at the high school reunion brought back memories. He hadn't been my first boyfriend, or even my most remembered, and far from my favorite, but he had played an important role in my life the summer after our senior year.
Now I was divorced, and he was married with a couple of little kids. Married to Janet, a girl he'd known in high school. She'd been a couple of grades behind us, and I hadn't known her well, but we'd been on the softball and soccer teams together, and she'd been a fellow flag twirler my senior year. She was pretty, and friendly. I wondered if he had ever taken her to the house.
The old Watts house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, on a lot that was probably worth at least half a million dollars it the owners had wanted to sell. The house itself was in need of major repair, and would probably have had to be torn down rather than remodeled. The paint was peeled, and many of the boards on the porch were rotten where the rain had blown in over the years the house had been empty.
I didn't believe in ghosts, or course, but tales of the old haunted house fascinated me as much as they did the other teenagers who were drawn there over the years. Supposedly, a man had murdered his entire family there years before, then hanged himself in the cellar. The story was that if you were there on the new moon you could see his ghost.
Whether or not there had been murders there, the house was spooky. It was built in a gothic style, sometime in the nineteenth century. The original owners had been prominent citizens, a doctor and his wife. The family that ended up dead there were renters, according to legend, a man down on his luck who had moved in sometime in the nineteen fifties because he and his family were allowed to live there in exchange for doing repairs.
The fact that it was badly in need of repairs even half a century before pointed to the fact that nobody had cared enough about it or it's potential value to keep it up. The doctor and his wife, James and Myrna Watts, were buried in the local cemetery. The dates on their graves were 1911 and 1924. He had died first, at age eighty four. She was, according to the dates on the stone, ten years younger than he. I thought that, going by the dates and ages on the tombstone, that the house must have been built sometime in the mid eighteen hundreds, when they were a young couple.
The house had been wired for electricity, and there were two bathrooms, one with an old fashioned tub still intact, and a high seated toilet missing it's tank. The other bathroom had only the sink surviving, with dual faucets and a pedestal. Most of the rooms were empty. There were a few odd pieces of furniture, a dresser with a broken mirror in one of the bedrooms, a broken down sofa downstairs that had probably not been there when the last tenants lived in the house. I imagined that it had been dragged there by teenaged lovers to provide a place to stretch out besides the floor.
There was also a worn mattress in one of the upstairs rooms, which I thought probably had similar origins to the downstairs sofa.
The room with the mattress had two walls with windows, with most of the glass broken out of the frames. They provided ventilation, making the room smell much less musty than the downstairs, where all the windows had been boarded up. The broken windows also provided access to the house. A makeshift ladder had been affixed to what had once been a trellis on the porch leading to the roof, from which it was easy, if you watched where you stepped and didn't fall through, to get into the upstairs bedroom.
I had never had the nerve to go there on my own. Not that I was afraid of anything supernatural, but I did have a little paranoia about rape. I fantasized about going there by myself and being captured by a group of guys who would strip me naked and make me do all sorts of things I liked thinking about but didn't really want to be forced to do.
I had been there with groups of friends of course. In the daytime, with nothing in mind except looking at the inside of a place we weren't supposed to be, my friends and I had sneaked in, looked around, and left. There were used condoms on both floors and lots of empty beer cans. We had wanted to go into the cellar, but it had been secured with a large padlock, and none of us were adept enough to open it. A couple of girlfriends and I had been there three times during the summer when we were sixteen, always in the daytime, and always making sure that there was nobody else around before we climbed up. Like myself, they were thrilled with the thoughts of being raped, and appalled at the possibility.
Tommy was the first boy I had ever gone to the house with alone. Even then I wasn't willing to go at night. It wasn't that it was understood that if a girl went to the old house at night with a guy that she was going to get fucked. I wanted to get fucked. I just didn't want to be there after dark. Other people might be there after dark and it would be impossible to see them through the open cracks in the boards and the broken windows until we were already in the house.
He wasn't from the neighborhood, and hadn't even lived in the town long, only a couple of years, so it wasn't surprising that he'd never been there. The popularity of the house as a lover's resort had peaked during my parent's youth anyway, and the stories of trysts and orgies there were only marginally more realistic than the stories of ghosts and supernatural activity. There were certainly more convenient places to go for sex.
It helped to bring a blanket if you were just going there to fuck. The mattress was very stained and dusty, even though it was the cleanest room in the house. I don't know who did the cleaning, probably some girl who liked a little less dust and mildew in places where she got naked. Maybe the ghosts cleaned it, but the surfaces were mostly dust free, even if the mattress had dust embedded so deeply that it could never be cleaned properly.
I had worn shorts, and scratched my leg on the way up the ladder. It wasn't deep enough to bleed, but it was a distraction. I worry about germs, especially in filthy old houses. I wanted to explore the house and have a little fun with Tommy, not get a flesh eating virus or some kind of bacterial infection that would leave me needing an amputation. Even rape would be preferable to that.
"Let me see," Tommy said, leaning over to inspect my leg. "It doesn't look like you broke the skin, just a nasty red mark."
Having him touch my leg sent a little shiver through me. "Did you bring something?" I asked him.
"What?" He asked. "Like a band aid?"
"No," I said. I had a condom in my pocket, but I wanted him to have one. "Protection."
