Deadly Welcome Read Free Page B

Ducklin’s and she’d say, “Hello there, Alex.” Butthey didn’t know each other. And he would hear them talking dirty about her, at Ducklin’s and at the school. “You don’t have no chore getting the pants off Jenna, Herbie. She don’t wear none, boy.” It would give him a feeling of sickness and anger, and he didn’t want to hear it and yet he did.
    Then, in the Arcadia game in his sophomore year, when Bowers was hurt and they sent him in, he became a personage. He’d had his full height then, one inch over six feet, but he had weighed only a hundred and fifty-five. But it was all hard, fibrous muscle, and there had been a lot to prove, and this was the time. The chance.
    And he had become part of the group, running with them when he had time off from the store, accepted. In the group with Jenna, and closer to her. Didn’t think she would say yes to a date, Didn’t ask for one. She asked him. Spence had given her a fast little runabout. He had taken it in on a trade at the boat yard and had it put back in shape. She asked him, in the store, on a Saturday night when they all stopped in. Asked when the others were talking and couldn’t hear. “Come to the yard tomorrow morning, Alex. About ten. We’ll try out the
Banshee
. Make a picnic out of it.”
    They took it down the bay, down between the mainland and the south end of Ramona Key, and then out through the tidal chop and Windy Pass, and then, running outside in the Gulf down most of the deserted length of Kelly Key and anchoring it just off a wide white beach, anchoring it in the shallows and wading ashore with the beer and food and blankets and her little red portable radio. A strange day, unbelievable that he was alone with her. They took turns changing to swim suits behind a screen of sea grapes. Casual talk and some laughter. Swimming and sandwiches and beer. A strange day of mounting tensions, in glance and accidental touch. With the strain mounting between them until,at dusk, she was in his arms whispering that she thought he would never never try. He had been scared as well as wanting. He hoped they had been wrong—all that talk. He hoped they had been making it all up about her.
    But she rolled away and took off the damp green and white swim suit and she was there for a little time to be looked at, and he somehow did not want to look at her but could not look away, until she rolled back to him with a little raw laugh and hungry mouth. He was virgin yet felt he should be gentle and tender because she was such a small girl. But tenderness was not her need. And even as he held her in that ultimate closeness, he had known with a wisdom beyond his years that he still did not know Jenna Larkin, that perhaps no one could know her. And in this union she had contrived, he was but an instrument of her restlessness and protest.
    He drove the little
Banshee
home through dark familiar waters, her head on his shoulder while they sang old songs, sleepy with the sun, the swimming, the beer and the love. Very sophisticated. Making no direct reference to what had happened between them. Her car was at the yard, and when she dropped him off at the Ducklin house and responded so completely to his kiss, he asked her when he could have another date, sensing that “date” was now a new word for him.
    “I don’t know, Alex. Sometime, I guess. You ask me, hear?”
    “I’ll ask you.”
    When he was in bed with the lights off that night, it all seemed unreal, and he tried to encompass the enormous realization that It had finally happened to him, and It had happened with Jenna Larkin. He lay in the dark with his eyes wide, and went over each vivid fragment of memory right up to the point where he had not been aware of anything in the world, and beyond that to where he had been aware of her again, watching him with a strange intensity. He tried to think how the nextdate would be, and he tried to feel anticipation. But he merely felt sleepy and uncomprehending, and