Chapter 8

Monday, May 21

To recap, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, after spending my entire junior year just hoping to get a steady date with a girl, any girl, behaving myself and only letting my hands roam as far as the girls permitted, I had now had sexual intercourse on four consecutive days.

With two different girls.

One of whom was my sister.

Who has plans for me to go out with at least three other girls.

Is this how Charlie Sheen got started on his sex addiction?

I finally roused myself from my stupor, got my dick put away, my clothes straightened out and staggered back to my room. I could hear the shower running in the bathroom I shared with my sister, from which I surmised Morgan was washing off the evidence of our recent tryst.

I grabbed a clean set of clothes for the second time that afternoon and headed down to my parents’ en suite to do the same.

I was still in something of a daze as I dried off. Dr. Ensberry had warned me of his daughter’s forceful personality, but I seriously doubted he had this in mind. There’s overwhelmed, and then there’s totally blown away.

I came out of the master suite just as Kacie was coming out of the laundry room, where she’d just put Morgan’s top and skirt on to wash.

“How is she?” I asked my sister.

“Glowing, floating three feet of the ground,” my sister said. “You rocked her world, bro! You’re not getting rid of her any time soon.”

“I don’t want to get rid of her, I just don’t want her to think all I want from her — or any girl, for that matter — is sex,” I said. “When she’s ready, we need to all sit down and have a long talk, preferably somewhere the parents won’t hear but public enough that that doesn’t happen again.”

“I guess you’re right, but she’s been building this up in her mind for years,” Kacie said. “When she finally had her chance, she went a little overboard.”

“Have any of the others been building it up like that?”

“No, not to that extent, but I know a couple of them wouldn’t put up much of a fight if you tried something.”

“Again, why am I just now finding out about this?” I asked. “I could have been going out with one of them for a couple of years now.”

“You weren’t ready,” Kacie said, looking me straight in the eye. “If you were going to turn out to be an asshole, none of them wanted to be the one who found out. So we decided to let the older girls break you in, train you, so to speak.

“Now we all know you won’t do anything stupid and you won’t go blabbing it all over school when you do get very far with a girl.”

“Meaning?”

“Holly Moseley.”

Ah, yes. Holly. The one girl with whom I’d done more than just kiss and cuddle. I’d all but lost my virginity to her. I mean we were to the point of no return — lying between her thighs, my naked dick pointing at her uncovered pussy — when something made me pull back. I don’t know if she was ready or not, but in that instant I knew I wasn’t.

I’d taken Holly to the Winter Formal in February. As with Jenny Evans and the prom, there had been a few preliminary dates in advance. A couple of basketball games, one movie night, low-key, low-pressure outings. I didn’t even try to kiss her the first time out and she was the one to place my hand on her boob when we did have a makeout session.

The night of the dance, Dad let me drive his Buick. Bench seats. BIG back seat. Built for comfort.

We had dinner at a nice steakhouse and had been at the dance barely an hour when Holly indicated she was ready to leave. It wasn’t even 9:30.

I resigned myself to an early evening, chalking it up as another good effort that just didn’t work out. As I steered the car toward her home, she suggested we head out to the lake to a notorious makeout spot.

Holly helped add to the notoriety almost immediately. I barely had the car in Park when she turned her back to me and asked me to unhook her dress.

We spent the next hour fogging up the windows, getting hotter and heavier until I called a halt. I did my best to make things good for her, but I reached the conclusion that I just wasn’t going to go all the way in the back seat of my dad’s Buick.

I got Holly home well before her curfew, then spent the next hour driving around with all the windows down to air out the car.

Holly never spoke to me after that night, but someone said something somewhere. All of a sudden, guys I didn’t know were giving me high fives. And girls acted like they weren’t sure how to behave around me, like a moth drawn to the light of a flame but afraid of the heat. That attitude persisted for the rest of the school year, my prom date notwithstanding.

“What about Holly?”

“There was talk around school after the Winter Formal that you’d fucked her, punched her V card,” Kacie said. “But you never mentioned it if you did. You never even mentioned Holly again, for that matter.”

“Why would people think I had sex with Holly?”

“Because she said you did. Even described your birth mark.”

I have a discolored spot on my left pelvic bone that can’t be seen if I have any clothes on, even a bathing suit. I call it my map of Iceland because of its irregular shape.

“I thought she might have been telling the truth until this weekend,” Kacie said.

“And what changed your mind?”

“She said you had a little dick and weren’t any good,” my sister told me. “Said you couldn’t get her off and that’s why she dumped you.”

Just then, the washer dinged, signaling the end of its cycle. Kacie turned to go put Morgan’s things in the dryer.

I headed back to my room to dump the worn clothes in my hamper, then stuck my head into Kacie’s room to check on Morgan.

She was curled up on Kacie’s bed wearing a pair of Kacie’s shorts and an oversized T-shirt, casually flipping through a magazine. The shorts obviously had a drawstring pulled tight, otherwise they would have never stayed on Morgan’s tiny frame.

“Hey,” I said. Yeah, maybe not the best opening line, but I still wasn’t really thinking clearly.

“Hey,” Morgan smiled.

“You doing OK?”

“I’m more than OK. C’mere,” she said, patting a spot on my sister’s bed.

I sat down and she reached up to put her arms around my neck, giving me a little smooch. I pulled her onto my lap and just looked into her eyes, which were still green. Heaving a big sigh, I started in.

“You know we probably shouldn’t have done that, don’t you?” I asked her. “We should have spent a little more time getting to know each other, gone out on a few dates — hell, gone out on our first date — found out what we like and don’t like.”

“We’ve known each other for years and I’ve known I wanted this almost since the day I met you,” she answered stubbornly. “I’ve been waiting for you to notice me a long time. I finally got tired of waiting.”

“I’ve asked Kacie the same thing — if you were that interested, why didn’t you ever say anything? We went to the same junior high and we’ve been in the same high school for two years. How many Sadie Hawkins dances have there been you could’ve asked me to?”

“I was afraid you’d say no,” Morgan whispered, burying her face in my chest. “I kept hoping you’d ask me to anything, even just to go for ice cream. Lunch yesterday at the pizza place is as close as we’ve come to going out together, and Kacie was the one who asked me to go.

“It was bad enough with the other girls also trying to get your attention. Now you’re with Kacie and I can’t compete with her. I won’t compete with her.”

“It’s not a competition,” I said, lifting her chin so I could again look into her eyes. “You know as well as Kacie and I do that we can’t really be together. In a way, I wish Friday night never happened. I know it shouldn’t have, but there’s nothing I can do about it. At the same time, I’m not unhappy it happened. I love my little sister and want her to be happy. I’ll do what I can to see she is happy.