At some point she fell asleep, a state of which she was aware only retroactively, being brought awake by a body-sense of deprivation. He had separated himself from her and rolled to face away. She raised her head to peep over his slender shoulder, looking down that hairless plateau of chest and belly. His manhood was enlarged now, quite stiff and domineering, with him asleep. But before she was able to fall back and contemplate the loveliness of this in pure mind, she saw his hand sneak out from beneath his hip, and enclosing the base of the projection, begin to—
“No, sweetheart,” she said, turning him to her, he pretending to be asleep with squeezed eyes. “That will give you pimples.”
He kept his lids lowered. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t help it.”
He was in her now, and she moved her hand out and around his narrow hip and into the small of his taut, boyish back.
“Neither can I,” she said. “I want you to remember that when you are grown up and I am dead.”
But when their eyes flared in unison, she forgot, for the first time ever, her habitual self-pity.
Ralph did not come back to real life until, rounding the town-hall corner on wingèd feet, five minutes from home, his eye was distracted from the celestial semen of the Milky Way by the clock on the fire-department annex. The time was 1:25.
As had always been his wont, he had told the truth when apprehended after breaking Bigelow’s window: and been taken for a liar. Manliness was sometimes mere folly. He must be shrewder now and do something like steal in through the outside basement door, go boldly upstairs, and if his father was staked out in the living room, profess to have gone down cellar in early evening to find a certain old issue of Open Road for Boys and to have fallen asleep over it, concealed behind the high stacks of discarded papers awaiting the junkman; to have awakened only now, disoriented and dismayed.
If all was quiet, the same narrative would serve in the morning. The essential thing was to deliver it with an air of confidence, so that though his father would hardly accept the details he might well, if Ralph knew the man, himself so suave in manner, bold in deed, at least respect the authority with which it was told.
About the Author
THOMAS BERGER is the author of more than twenty novels. His previous novels include Regiment of Women, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, and The Feud, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His novel Little Big Man was made into a successful movie and is known throughout the world.
Thomas Berger, Sneaky People
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