“Why do you always turn everything back to sex?” I snap.
“Sex is everything,” she replies, swimming gracefully to the deep end and treading water. “Don’t you know anything?”
“You’re wrong,” I say, following her. I don’t need to swim. I’m tall enough to reach the bottom. “There’s more to life than sex.”
“Sex makes you feel good.”
“What Dad makes those men do to you isn’t good,” I point out. “They’re using you.”
“Why do you have to be so mean all the time?” She splashes me. “They like me. They want me!”
“They want tofuckyou,” I correct her. “There’s a difference.”
“What makes you any different?”
I should leave the pool. Things have gotten complicated fast. I should head straight for a cold shower and jack off to the thought of how good it would feel to bury myself inside her, but I stay. I’m not like the other men in her life. I want to protect her.
“I care about you,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “Fucking is about more than feeling good. If you love someone, sex feels better.”
She floats on her back now, extending her arms wide at her sides. Her breasts break the surface of the water like small peaks. She hasn’t been socialized to feel self-conscious about being naked. Her openness with her body is refreshing, but it also makes me fucking furious. Dad made her this way. He wants her to be unashamed and ready to share herself with anyone he presents. I don’t want her showing herself to everyone. Those saggy-balled fuckers don’t deserve to jizz over her perfection. She doesn’t realize how beautiful she is, but those twisted fuckers do. Fucking her is the closest they’ll get to heaven because they’re going straight to hell.
Clementine Jackson is a fucking angel. My angel.
“An orgasm is an orgasm,” Clemmie says. She’s immature in many ways but extremely adult in others, like how she candidly talks about sex. Another thing I have to thank our sack of shit father for. “They always feel good.”
“Sex can mean something too.”
I usually try to avoid this topic of conversation and ask her about the books she reads. To my knowledge, reading is all she does between the weekly parties. Sometimes she asks me about my job at the garage. Fixing cars is easy. It’s something I’ve always been good at. There was a garage outside the trailer park where I grew up, and the owner let me work there. He never paid me for my work but would give me hotdogs or bags of chips in exchange. I didn’t give a shit about child labor laws if it meant getting something to eat. Helping rebuild cars was a lifeline to me. It kept me out of trouble and kept me away from my mom.
She was a drug addict who kicked her son out of the trailer to service guys to put more junk in her body. Like Clemmie, sex meant nothing to her. Maybe Dad made her that way too. Mom never spoke about him, and now I finally understand why.
“I don’t believe you,” Clemmie says. “How many girls have you slept with?”
My cock softens at the thought of the women I got hot and heavy with in the past. Having sex at thirteen was normal where I’m from. Getting pregnant before sixteen was practically a rite of passage. Thankfully I got lucky. Most girls I fucked were older and couldn’t afford another kid. I’ve always looked older, and the women I fucked never asked questions when they invited me inside.
After losing my virginity, I stopped going to school altogether. I could read and write but didn’t see the point in traveling an hour to get there. Why did I need to study when I could fix cars and get paid? Besides, the authorities didn’t bother checking up on me and assumed we had skipped town.
“Twenty,” I say.
The actual number is half that, but I don’t want to make her feel bad.
“Do you know how many people I’ve had sex with?” she asks. “Guess.”
“The same as me?”
She laughs. “More.”
My stomach lurches. “How many more?”
“I don’t know exactly, a couple hundred, maybe more,” she says like it’s nothing. I want to kill every motherfucker who hurt her. “Sometimes it’s the same people, other times it’s different ones. They all blur into one. Sex is just sex. It’s no big deal. That’s what Daddy says.”
“Daddy doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” I snarl. “You shouldn’t listen to him.”
Since her childhood, he’s primed her to spread her legs. He’s taught her that she must please men. She sees it as a privilege.
“He said I shouldn’t listen to you!” She flips over onto her front and swims toward me. “Why should I?”
“Because I haven’t left yet,” I say.