He just nods.
Awkwardly he raises his hips from the sofa to help her as she pulls the trousers and pants down to his knees.
It’s the first time that anyone else has seen him like this.
It feels strange, to have someone else there, looking at it.
She touches it with her hand, and then lowers her mouth to it.
To be comfortable, though, she has to kneel on the floor.
She kneels on the floor and takes it in her mouth again. He’s looking at the top of her head, at the roots of her hair where the blond, he now sees, is slightly mixed with gray. He wonders how it is that her teeth aren’t hurting him, that her mouth is so soft. He feels himself already starting to come as he stares up at the ceiling, and then at the balcony, where the afternoon sun is glowing in the green glass panels, and then at the top of her head again, which is moving faster now. And now she’s doing something with her tongue that just… It’s almost too much, almost like pain, though not pain, the opposite of pain.
He makes a small, startled sound.
Her head stops moving.
Her mouth slides off him. Her eyes are shut. So is her mouth—she inhales through her nose.
After a few seconds she stands up and leaves and from the kitchen he hears the sound of water in the sink.
He has this peaceful feeling.
For a minute or two he feels extremely at ease, just sitting there looking at the tidy living room, and at the balcony with the sun glowing in the panels of green glass.
On the balcony, in the sunlight, is a big jar with lots of small cucumbers in it, submerged in a milky liquid. Crammed in at the top of the jar is what seems to be wet bread.
She’s making kovászos uborka, fermented pickles.
She comes back and sits down next to him on the sofa, and seeing her he again feels confused and sort of ashamed that he is doing this with someone like her, with a woman who might be older than his mother, who makes kovászos uborka.
She’s stroking his hair.
“Did you like that?” she asks.
He nods.
Afterward he walks down the stairs and sits on a bench in the little park near the housing estate.
There’s a man on the next bench who’s smoking a cigarette.
István asks him if he can buy one.
“You can have one,” the man says.
István goes back to his own bench and sits there smoking the cigarette that the man gave him. Small movements of air make the leaves on the branches above him clatter softly.
She shows him her breasts. The nipples are weird—surprisingly big, and brown, and with these little things like warts on them.
When he first sees them he’s slightly disgusted. But then later, thinking about them, he masturbates more than once.
He finds it strange how, at the same time, he can find them slightly disgusting and also be so turned on by them, or by the memory of them.
It’s partly the way she showed them, he thinks.
He was sitting at her kitchen table eating Somloi galuska while she put the groceries away and then, when she had finished doing that, she asked him if he wanted to see them and he said yes, and she just showed them to him—standing there in the kitchen she took off first her shirt and then her bra. It’s the memory of her doing that that turns him on, as much as what they actually looked like. What they actually looked like seems almost irrelevant. Or that they were weird and slightly disgusting might even have had the effect of turning him on more.
When he had finished the Somloi galuska, they went to the sofa and kissed for a while and then she undid his trousers and sucked him off again.
Then he left.
The next time it happens she says, “I swallowed it.”
“Yeah?” he says, still with that peaceful feeling he always has for a few minutes afterward.
She nods, sort of smiling at him.
“Okay,” he says.
“Will you do something for me?” she asks.
“Okay,” he says.
She takes his hand and puts it between her legs. She lifts her skirt up to her waist—she is wearing black tights underneath it—and puts his hand where she wants it.
She presses it there firmly.
The place where she presses it is soft and yielding through the layers of fabric.
When he does nothing, she starts to move his hand herself.
She positions his fingers precisely.
“Like that,” she says. “There. Like that.”
She lets go of his hand and he moves it himself.
There’s something wrong with the way he is doing it though.
She takes hold of his hand again, and moves it energetically, pressing it into her. “Like that.”
“Okay,” he says.
She shuts her eyes.
He keeps doing it until his arm gets tired.
“Thank you,” she says, when he stops.
On Sunday his mother takes him to lunch at the McDonald’s in the new shopping mall. The McDonald’s only opened a few months ago.
His mother watches him eat. She isn’t eating herself. She has a paper cup of McDonald’s coffee that she occasionally takes a sip from. “How’s school?” she asks.
“It’s fine,” he says.
“At the parent-teacher meeting last week,” she says. “They said you seem distracted sometimes.”
He shrugs.
“Your marks have slipped a bit.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“I wonder if it’s that you’re spending too much time playing those computer games,” she suggests.
“No,” he says.
“Then?”
“What?”
“I’m just trying to understand,” she says. “Are you making friends?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
He nods, not looking at her.
“That’s good,” she says.
He isn’t sure if she believes him or not.
He and the lady walk to the supermarket. It’s raining. He holds the umbrella over them both. “I want to make love with you,” she says when they are in her kitchen again. “I want to feel you inside me. Do you want to do that?”
“Okay,” he says.
“Is your mother at home?”
“No,” he says.
They do it on his bed. She insists on the window shutter being fully lowered—maybe because of what happened when she showed him her breasts, the look of slight disgust or whatever it was that she must have seen on his face then.
She puts the condom on him herself. He lies on his back on the bed and she lowers herself onto him. He just lies there while she moves her hips and makes quiet noises. He can’t really see her in the near-darkness with the shutter down.
A few moments after he comes she stops moving.
He feels himself shrink inside her until his dick slides out. It feels like it sort of slides out sideways. It’s a strange feeling.
She leans down to him so that he smells her breath when she says that he’s a man now, and asks him how that feels.
He thinks it’s strange that he doesn’t feel any different, that nothing seems to have changed. He doesn’t say that. He just sort of shrugs, still lying there on his back, and she moves away from him and starts to get dressed again.
“Are you all right?” she asks when he doesn’t say anything for a while.
“Yes,” he says.
“Okay,” she says. And then speaking to him out of the near-darkness she says that she feels honored that he did it for the first time with her, and thanks him, and then she leaves, and he doesn’t move for a while.
He has a shower.
In the shower he gets hard again and masturbates.
It takes him a long time to come.
When he finally does, he leans against the tiled wall and listens to the water pecking at the plastic shower curtain, still thinking that it’s strange that he doesn’t feel any different, that everything seems to be the same.
He takes the bus into town and has a Big Mac Meal.
It’s early evening when he gets back. The streetlights have just come on, all at the same time.