Rick felt devastated. From the incredible high he had felt as he bounced out of Mrs. Witherdine's bed at Marie's insistence, he had been dealt a low blow in the back of the balls. He had run four-square into Jenny Roman, suddenly the most beautiful girl he had ever met, and she knew beyond any doubt that he was her great-aunt's lover, her paid boyfriend, a hanger-on of old ladies, a suck-ass.
There was a single bill in the envelope, one hundred dollars.
A hundred bucks for a single fuck. It would have been worth it if he had still been able to convince himself he was going to be happy fucking old ladies. He enjoyed the beach birds swooping and singing over his head, and the feel of the breeze on his face. He enjoyed walking.
He had made a hundred bucks, and screwed himself out of a million.
He was kicking stones out of the roadway when the little red sports car pulled up from behind him and stopped.
Jenny Roman sat in the driver's seat. She looked at him long and hard with only a suggestion of a smile around her dark eyes.
Chapter 5
Jenny's lips formed a nice little pout as she looked at him.
She stared straight at him with her black, very deep eyes. She did not wear any makeup at all, but her skin was perfect, smooth, as tanned as her long legs that smoothed out of her white shorts. Rick looked down her face to the thin yellow T-shirt she was wearing. It was made of a rayon-like material, thin and stretchy and very clingy, and where it rose on her chest to cover her breasts Rick could see her firm little nipples. She looked wealthy, sure of herself, and very beautiful. Rick said, looking at her tits, "Hi." "Want a lift?" she asked.
"Did you finish the cake?"
She had a lot of her grandmother's directness about her. She said, "I asked you first."
Rick laughed, then stepped over the car door, sliding down into the leather bucket seat.
"What's your name?" Jenny asked, slipping the ear into gear.
"Answer my question," Rick grinned.
Looking over at him, as she let out the clutch and started down the road, she inspected his eyes, his mouth. "Yes. Marie makes very nice cake. Now, what's your name?"
"Rick."
"Rick Temple, isn't it? Don't you work at the club? Teach sailing, or something?" "Right." Rick liked the way she drove: sure of herself, carefully, fast but not too fast as if she had something phony to prove to herself. Rick, thought she was just like the old lady had been, thirty or so years ago. He wondered about her in bed, if she hungered for it as much as her great-aunt did, and he imagined she was just as hungry as he looked again at her tits, her slim bare belly under the bottom edge of the T-shirt, the full hips inside the white shorts and the firm, long tanned legs. Rick imagined her hairy lips and wanted to slide a few fingers between them, feel her moisture start to flow.
"Is this your first year at the club?" she asked as if she was unaware of Rick's thoughts.
"Yes." He cocked his right foot on the door ledge; sending her messages with his body. He turned more toward her.
"How did you meet Auntie?"
Rick looked down the road. The resort was not far ahead. He did not have much time to move in on the niece as well as the great-aunt. He wondered if it would be possible, if perhaps he had not blown everything, that maybe she wanted some of what the old lady was getting, that maybe she would like to try out the old lady's fucking, see what her great-aunt saw in this mere child of a man. "I met her through a mutual friend," he said.
Jenny negotiated the turn easily and slowed clown to pass through the resort area between the carousel and the popcorn stand. She said, without looking at Rick, "That's how she meets all her lovers. That's what you are, aren't you?"
Rick was too stunned for a moment to negotiate an answer. As jenny slowed to a stop in front of the sailing club, he managed weakly, "Huh? W h a t was… that?"
Jenny stopped the car. Her long tanned legs worked the clutch and brake beautifully, gracefully, as if they could not make a mistake. "Aren't you her gigolo? Her new one?"
Rick didn't know whether a gigolo admitted being one or not. If he denied it, how was he to find new business? If he admitted it, wouldn't he be blowing his cover and make all the old ladies afraid he would gossip about what they did in the secrecy of their bedrooms? Would grand-nieces screw their great-aunt's lovers? But all the time he knew there was no doubt that Jenny knew what he was doing sneaking down the backstairs with an envelope in his hand. And if that hadn't told her all she needed to know, the guilty expression on Marie's face certainly had, exposed everything the maid had been trying to keep secret.
"Yes, I am," he said, having figured it was better to say yes than no.
Jenny smiled. "Does she pay well?"
Rick was only a couple years older than Jenny, if that much, but suddenly he felt that he was about forty, that he was nothing more than a dirty old man trying to seduce a kid. He felt himself aging in front of her. He imagined her imagining him naked, coupled in bed between her great-aunt's legs. He felt that she looked at him with accusing eyes. He said, "What she pays is none of your business."
He wanted to tell her he didn't sleep with old ladies, that he wasn't a male whore, that he only got it up with young, firm and sweet young girls like Jenny herself. He knew that Mrs. Witherdine's cunt had been finer, better, more experienced than many of the younger things he had dipped into, but how could he explain that to Jenny, or even persuade her that it was true? How could he defend himself by telling Jenny what a good lay her great-aunt had been?
He felt naked but unable to get an erection. Defenseless. He opened the door to get out.
"I hope you're nice to her," she said. "She needs men once in awhile and it is hard for her to meet them, decent men, in her position."
Rick thought that she was being kind, but he did not want that now. He wanted to have met the great-aunt, the Grand Dame, because he was dating Jenny, not the other way around. He could have had the whole pie, instead of merely the crust.
"She's a nice lady," Rick said, "but I don't know her too well yet." He got out and closed the door. "I imagine she was just like you are, when she was your age.
Jenny smiled. "We are a lot alike. But not really. Auntie was a virgin when she got married."
With that, she let out the clutch and her twin exhausts roared away up the street. Away, Rick thought, from the sailing club and its kids waiting for Rick to teach them to sail, away from jobs and hours and away from Rick and old ladies' gigolos, and toward a rendezvous with some young, strong and virile collegiate type who was just like Rick had been before' he started fucking old ladies.
Rick spent the half hour before his first class shooting billiards and he felt better when he heard the loud crack as he broke the balls, but he thought to himself that he was only twenty and too young for his life to have come full circle already. Because of the cheap way he had felt with Jenny, he remembered Linda Long and how badly he had treated her the summer, only four years before but seemingly ages ago, when they had both been counselors at the same camp.
He took his class into the boats and showed them spinnakers and tillers, explained the necessity for the proper ratio between mast and keel blade. As he moved into open water with the three advanced students, he went through the motions of teaching them but his mind was on Jenny Roman and how he had felt when he realized for certain that she thought of him only as her great-aunt's lover.
Her great-aunt's lover.
He thought he could have managed it if he had been screwing her mother, or an older sister if she had had one. But to be dicking the grand old dame herself? It might have given him a little class if he hadn't decided he wanted the grand-niece herself. He felt as if Jenny had kicked him in the stomach, or, more precisely, as if he had kicked himself in the balls.