• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2030 0

trousers, and fascinated me but reddened me all over with embarrassment or guilt at watching or…yes, reddened me with a kind of lust. I was not, for going on three years now, a virgin, and I knew the meaning of that thickening and extension inside his pants, but I had never actually observed it, even if my observation now was impeded by the covering of his trousers. I knew it could happen in dreams: sometimes I’d seen Rouser asleep, when he wasn’t chasing rabbits in his dreams, chasing some imaginary bitch and letting his pink thing swell and pop out of its furry sheath and drool. I wondered if Nail was dreaming about Viridis, even dreaming about something he’d never done, because, to the best of my knowledge at that time, in twenty-seven years he had never succeeded in doing what I had done nearly three years before, when I was only eleven. While studying him, I amused myself by imagining that I was reaching out and unbuttoning the fly of his trousers and liberating from the prison of its clothes that big convict.

This daydream was so real and diverting that I was shocked to realize his eyes were open and looking at me as if I had actually done it. Or maybe in my lust I really had done it while thinking it was only a daydream. One of his big hands abruptly covered his groin. He stared at me and began to tremble. Was he afraid of me?

I was smiling as big as I could, but also frowning, at his trembling. “Howdy, Nail,” I said. “It’s just me, Latha.”

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You made it!” I said. “But are you all right?”

“I reckon not,” he said. “I must be real bad sick, ’cause I don’t have the least idee how I managed to git here.”

I reached out and put my hand on his forehead. At the real touch of his skin I knew that I had only imagined touching him down below. Reality is always more touchable than imagination. “You’re real cold,” I said. “Cold as death.”

“Yeah, I’ve been either too cold or too hot or too wet for quite a spell.” His words came out almost like stuttering, because of the chattering of his teeth and the trembling of his body.

I drew a blanket up over him. And then another one. And yet another one. And then a quilt. I draped and tucked more covers over him than I’d ever had myself the coldest winter night of my life, and still he shook so mightily that I thought he’d pop right out of the bed. I couldn’t understand how anybody could be so cold on such a hot morning. Well, it was cooler in the cavern than out in the sunshine, but not all that cool. I touched my own brow, and I felt normal; no, I felt a good bit hotter than normal. I considered that his conscience might be giving him a nervous chill: that he had killed a man and now feared the consequences. But nobody ever shook like that simply from guilt or fear. He was, I understood, sick. I wanted to run and fetch not Viridis but Doc Swain, but I was afraid that Nail would shake himself to death and freeze while I was gone.

So, almost without thinking, I did what I did: I climbed beneath the covers with him and held him tight, trying to warm him with the heat, the plenty of it, from my own body. The thick quilts and blankets piled atop us imprisoned my body heat and divided it with him, but that was not enough for both of us: I became cold myself. Together we trembled for a long time. We didn’t have our arms around each other, not all four arms anyhow, but we had our bodies pressed as hard together as they could get, and that big bulge down there in his pants had never gone away, and my mind was filled with wild thoughts and fear and chill and lust and everything.

Then we were not side by side, exactly. In an effort to still his shaking, I had pressed down on him, mashed him to his back, and I lay hard atop him, the whole length of him, mashing down, and then he did have both arms around me, around my back and my waist both, holding me tight to him. We squirmed and shook and squeezed in that position for so long that somehow the bulge in his britches worked itself directly beneath the juncture of my thighs so that our most private places were not