Threesome - Lawrence Block [45]
“Christ,” he said, quietly.
From the rear: “What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“What are you Christing about?”
“Jimmie’s got himself a girlfriend, that’s all.”
JIMMIE: “Will you for the love of God shut up?”
THE GIRL: “Oh, really? Oh, wow!”
I wanted to take my hand away. I wanted to think of a light way to pass all this off as a joke.
I kept my hand where it was.
The mood grew sexy in the extreme. The girl had gotten up from the back seat and was leaning over the front, commenting with interest on my manipulation of Jimmie. One of the boys had his arms around her from the back and was handling her breasts, and she kept giggling and telling the rest of us just what he was doing and just how it made her feel. I opened Jimmie’s zipper and put my hand inside, and he let me fumble around for a while and then extricated himself from his underwear and let me take hold of him. He had a good-sized penis, long and very slender, and I stroked him and moved my hand up and down on the shaft and was rewarded with an intake of breath from the back seat and a moan from Jimmie.
The girl said, “We’ve just got to call you something besides ma’am, ma’am.”
“Priss.”
“Is that short for something?”
“Priscilla.”
“Groovy. Well, I’m Gloria called Glory, and I’m presently being felt up by Ken and Robbo, and that’s Mike on the other side of the door, being left out, and that’s Jimmie that you’ve got your hand wrapped around, and I think he likes it. You’re absolutely out of sight, Priss.”
One of the boys in the back said, “Let’s have an orgy.”
“We’re having one, stupid.”
“I mean really.”
“Out of sight.”
“I wish the rain would stop. We could get high and ball in somebody’s field.”
“You dig to get high, Priss?”
“Yeah, Priss, do you dig grass?”
“Why not?”
“You hear it? Why not? Right on, Priss.”
“But this is like too cold and wet for fucking in cornfields.”
“I’ll bet you never fucked in a cornfield.”
“Would you believe a wheatfield?”
“No.”
“Would you believe a hayloft?”
“No.”
“Well, would you believe the locker room at half-time?”
“Wow!”
“Right on!”
There was a Holiday Inn coming up on the left. There always is. If you go off in any direction you’ll come to a Holiday Inn in the time it takes you to pass three supermarkets. I braked and swung the car around to the left with as little planning as I had taken in stopping for the five of them in the first place. I pulled the car to a stop and took my hand from Jimmie. I opened the door.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll get us a room.”
While I checked in at the desk, hoping that the room clerk wouldn’t find out what I was checking in with, it occurred to me that it might have been a sage move to take the car keys with me. All Jimmie had to do was tuck himself into his pants and turn the key in the ignition and I would be stuck at a Holiday Inn by myself, with no way to get home and no plausible explanation for my presence there.
Of course the car was still there, and the kids in it. Kids? They must have been nineteen or twenty, the same approximate age Rhoda and I had been when, in a sense, this entire story got started in the first place. Kids? I was no more than a decade older than them, and sometimes that seemed very much older indeed, and sometimes it did not.
The room was around the back on the first floor, and like all of the rooms at the better new models, it had a pair of double beds.
You wouldn’t believe what a great idea that is.
We smoked an impressive quantity of marijuana. I hadn’t had any in ages, but there are certain things you don’t forget once you learn them, like swimming or riding a bicycle or balling your roommate, and getting stoned is another of these. It came back to me easily enough. I drew smoke deep into my lungs and let myself tune in on myself, let everything spread out and get loose and easy.
I thought, suddenly, of Rhoda and Harry. How long would I be gone? Would anyone worry?