“Impossible.” Smiling, she lowered her lips to his belly and kissed it. “Dillon?”
“Hmm?”
“Teach me how to, you know, uh, make love to you with my mouth.”
His eyes, which had been drowsily half-closed, sprang open. Except for the time he had spent in the correctional institution, Dillon had always taken the availability of sex for granted. From the very first time, it had always come to him.
One morning during summer vacation from junior high school, Dillon had answered the knock on his grandmother’s back door.
Mrs. Chandler, their next door neighbor, was young and vivacious. She had big eyes, big breasts, and long legs, which she often showed off by wearing short shorts that separated and defined her cleft and bottom. Her husband drove a truck for the Safeway chain and was away from home more often than not. Boredom kept her a frequent visitor of the Burkes.
“Hi, Dillon. Is your grandma home?”
She knew damned well that his grandmother wasn’t at home because her car wasn’t in the driveway. Dillon, with thirteen-year-old recalcitrance, was tempted to point that out. But that would have been rude, and his grandmother had taught him some manners. He said, “Granny went to the store.”
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Chandler distressfully batted her eyelashes. “She told me to stop by and get those coupons she clipped for me. Do you know what she did with them?”
“They’re on the hall table.”
“Could I get them now, please? I was just about to go to the store myself when I remembered I didn’t have them.”
Dillon read through that lie, too. She wasn’t dressed for grocery shopping. She was outfitted for seduction. Out of curiosity, he pushed open the screen door. She bounced in. He made no move toward the hall table.
Instead, he stood facing Mrs. Chandler. He was already taller than she. She commented on his height as she ran her hands up his bare arms and across his muscled but hairless chest. It wasn’t fully developed, but it was showing tremendous promise.
“My, my, Dillon. I didn’t realize how big you’re getting.”
His young body was bursting with male hormones; his head hummed with lust. “So are you. Big, I mean.” His eyes moved down to her breasts. The large, dark areolas were distinct beneath her tight, white cotton blouse.
In seconds, even that was gone, and Mrs. Chandler was guiding his beardless face to her rosy nipples and poking them against his lips. Granny Burke pulled into the driveway just as the young, faithless wife from next door reached into Dillon’s shorts to explore.
Two days later, Mrs. Chandler got desperate enough to risk getting caught. She sneaked through the back door while Dillon’s grandmother was taking her afternoon nap. She held her index finger vertically against her pursed lips and signaled him into his bedroom. As they crept down the hall, they heard Granny’s soft snores coming from her open bedroom door.
As soon as Dillon had shut the door to his room, Mrs. Chandler fell on him like a starving feline. Lacking the finesse that comes only from experience, Dillon was just as ravenous. When he drove into her, she was sticky and hot. He exploded with pleasure. When it was over, her only complaint was that he had come too soon.
Patting his hand, she said, “We’ll work on that.”
“How?” he asked, gazing at her with his serious, hazel eyes. “How do we work on it?” he whispered. “What should I have done? Show me.”
His concern had been so unexpected, his interest so genuine, that she cried. She spent the remainder of the summer coaching him on how to please her and complaining that the “gorilla” she was married to didn’t even know where “it” was or what it was for. “He just screws me until I’m too sore to walk and thinks he’s proved that he’s a terrific lover.”
Dillon was a diligent student. He learned how to please, how to give what a woman needed and wanted. It was never far from his conscience that Mrs. Chandler was another man’s wife. What they did together was immoral, he knew. He made repeated vows to himself that he would stop. But then she would come to him all excited and eager, and he couldn’t resist her temptation or availability. Besides, he didn’t feel he owed a truck driver any consideration. The driver of the rig that had killed his parents had walked away from the grisly scene unscathed.
A few days after Labor Day, Mrs. Chandler came to tell his grandmother that her husband was being transferred. “We’re moving to Little Rock next weekend.”
“Good riddance,” Granny had muttered as she watched Mrs. Chandler pick her way through the rose bush hedge that separated their yards. Dillon had glanced sharply at his granny, wondering if she had known all summer long what was going on each afternoon in his bedroom while she was asleep in hers. They never talked about Mrs. Chandler again.
But Dillon never forgot her. He supposed men never forgot the first woman of whom they had carnal knowledge. He had used her body as an experimental laboratory, but he didn’t feel guilty for that. She had pursued him and had derived as much satisfaction as he—and sometimes more.
He applied the lessons he’d learned with Mrs. Chandler to the easy girls at school—most of whom were older than he. Then one of his “stepsisters” in the foster home benefitted from his expertise. She was a heavy girl with foul breath and bad skin who was pathetically grateful for the tenderness he showed her each night. The girls he met on the streets were jaded, and his encounters with them had little emotional impact.
He was as randy as a billy goat by the time he was released from reform school and entered college. Again, nature was on his side. Both psychologically and physically, he was mature beyond his years. The potential that Mrs. Chandler had spotted in him at thirteen had become realized: he had a tall, strong, lean body, and he was personable and well liked. He had no difficulty making friends with other young men or wooing desirable coeds into his bed.
The first woman ever to have gone down on him was a whore, contracted by his fraternity as a party favor for the rushees. She had a routine: a wag of her tits; a quick blow job; that’ll be ten bucks, please. There had been other times since then, but most women approached this specialized kind of lovemaking with dutiful resignation, as though it was something expected but unenjoyable. Never before had a woman gazed up at him with longing and love and asked to be taught the technique. He sifted Debra’s hair through his fingers and said softly, “You don’t have to.”
She gave him a puzzled look. “I want to. Are you embarrassed?”
He laughed shortly, realizing that he was. “A little.”