She started to pull her nightgown down but Ben caught her arms and stopped her.
“I’m not done yet,” Ben said. And he held Sally’s arms until she relaxed and lay back on the bed with her nightgown gathered around her belly button and her underwear on the linoleum floor.
“Let’s see your boobs,” Ben said.
“I don’t have any yet,” Sally said in an annoyed tone. She was not happy with Ben.
“Let me see.” Ben started to yank her nightgown up but Sally stopped him and did it herself.
Her breasts stuck out from her body just enough to look like a fat boy’s chest; there was nothing female or sexy about them. The nipples were puffy soft spots that looked slanted like Chinese eyes and sometimes felt like bruises.
She lay naked with Ben standing over her, and in their nakedness whatever they knew about how to move, how to walk or talk, completely disappeared.
The recreation room was spread out underneath the whole house. They could hear footsteps, muffled TV voices, water running, and Sally’s father locking the front door.
“Let’s do it,” Ben said, softly.
Sally knew what he was getting at but thought it was one of those things like reading the newspaper that you just didn’t do until you were grown up. She wasn’t as big on taking chances as she liked to think she was. Sally shook her head.
Ben pulled his nightshirt off. Sally looked at his nipples, small and flat like dimes.
“Oh, come on,” Ben said. “You’re no fun.”
And they were stuck there, silent, waiting, staring at each other’s nakedness until finally Sally said, “All right.”
“All right,” she said, and rolled over onto her stomach and poked her butt up into the air.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“That’s not how you do it,” Ben said.
“Yes it is,” Sally said and she stayed like that for about five minutes with Ben just watching her and both of them feeling more confused than they were willing to admit.
Suddenly they both saw something outside. It was a strange kind of something; a flicker of light, not white light like the flashlight, but red-orange light like a fire.
“Let’s go outside,” Ben said just as Sally was thinking they should go upstairs and beg to be allowed to sleep up there.
Sally shook her head.
“Come on,” Ben said. “We have to.” And even though Sally couldn’t imagine why they should go outside in the middle of the night, especially when they had just seen something out there, she was glad to be able to move.
There was something strange about the way Ben said “we have to,” as though whatever they had seen out there had something to do with them and they had to go outside and face it.
She started to put on her nightgown but Ben grabbed it and pulled it off her.
“No,” he said. “Naked.”
“I don’t want to,” Sally said.
Ben took her arms and pulled her to the sliding glass door that led outside. It was dark out. Sally didn’t like the dark.
“Are you scared?” Ben asked. Sally shook her head.
“I just don’t want to.”
“We have to,” Ben said.
Sally believed him. He took her hand and they walked toward the door.
* * *
Ben and Sally stood naked in the night, in the grass just beyond the back patio of Sally’s house. They stood five feet apart, facing out into the woods. The woods behind Sally’s house were part of the same stretch of woods that spread out behind all the houses on the street. They were a piece of the same woods that Ben and Sally had set on fire.
They stood, without realizing it, directly under Sally’s parents’ bedroom windows, which were open to the night air. They were silent, hypnotized by the sensation of the air on their naked bodies.
Ben’s erection stuck out in front of him like a compass or a divining stick. In the breeze it seemed alternately to shrink slightly and then get bigger than before, beating like a pulse. Ben touched himself. He couldn’t resist. He put his fingers around the head and rubbed a little bit. Sally saw him, watched him, and it was as though by touching himself — or maybe by not asking her to do it for him — he’d somehow broken the bond between them and had betrayed her. She didn’t say anything, but when Ben noticed her watching he stopped and let his hands fall to his sides.
The woods beyond the patio were pitch-dark, and so were the backyards to the left and right. Through the darkness and the leaves on the trees they could see lights on in houses far away. The breeze blew the leaves and the lights seemed to flicker like fires.
There was a small noise, heavier than a breeze but still very light, nothing to be afraid of. Ben and Sally looked at each other but were not scared — or were already too scared to be any more scared. The noise got louder, leaves moving, maybe an animal walking, and then they heard voices.
Ben and Sally stood tranquilized by their bath in the night. Neither had the power or desire to move. Two tall figures stepped out from the darkness, stepped out from behind the brick wall that separated the patio from the rest of the backyard. Sally immediately recognized the two figures as someone’s older brothers, but couldn’t remember whose. Ben knew them and kind of let one of his knees relax as if trying to assume a casual pose. In a way he was proud to be out there naked with Sally. His hard-on stood apart from him, independent, as though it had a life and a mind of its own; he tried to ignore it.
The two young men were carrying things, a television set, a large radio, a big bag, and other things that weren’t clear in the darkness. They stood directly in front of Ben and Sally, facing them each one-on-one. With the two boys there, somehow Ben and Sally were no longer together but stood alone. The four of them stood wordless in the backyard.
One of the boys put down the TV he was carrying, pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and lit it. They all breathed deeply, inhaling the smell. The cigarette glowed, flaring as the boy inhaled. He took a couple of drags and then handed the cigarette to Ben — whose erection, Sally noticed, seemed to be sinking. Ben smoked the cigarette.
“Honey, do you smell something burning?” Sally’s mother said.
Through the house and the night her voice sounded distant and far away.
Ben dropped the cigarette on the ground in front of him. The boy in front of him reached his sneakered foot out and crushed the cigarette into the grass. The four of them stood, completely motionless and breathless, waiting to be caught.
But there were no sounds other than the wind in the trees and no lights came on anywhere and after a minute they all started breathing again and thought they were safe.
The boy facing Sally put down the TV and the bag he was carrying. He reached out to Sally, his fingers sort of pinching together in the air. He reached for her breast, or the start of what would later be her breast, but changed his mind. The backs of his fingers brushed against her nipple for a second and Sally felt strange.
He lowered his hand, extended his index finger, and gently pushed into the break between Sally’s legs. He left his finger there, not inside, not outside, but held in the flesh of the slit.
Sally looked at Ben and saw that he had his erection back. Sally felt the finger there, felt the rest of the fingers and the hand outside her. It was as though someone had asked her to do a magic trick, to hold a pencil in her crotch for a minute or more.
In time the boy pulled his finger out and as he did, Sally could feel his fingernail lightly scraping her insides.