Tempted (22 page)

She got her tears under control and grabbed up a napkin from the holder to wipe the streaks of mascara from her cheeks. She took a few deep breaths and blew them out. She looked at the ceiling for a minute, her mouth trembling.

I waited. She took a few more deep breaths and wiped her eyes again. Then she looked at me.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, Claire.” I didn’t have much more to say.

“I knew it!” she cried. The tears came back, swimming in her blue eyes and melting the black eyeliner. “I knew you’d be disappointed in me!”

I wasn’t disappointed in her. How could I be? I shook my head. “I’m not—”

“I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d think I was stupid.” She put her face in her hands. “I wasn’t stupid, Anne. It was just an accident—I was on antibiotics for a UTI and the condom broke….”

“Claire. Shh. Stop. I don’t think you’re stupid.”

She buried her face in her arms and let go. Sobs wracked her shoulders and shook the table. I put an arm around her shoulders and said nothing, letting her cry.

Even as a baby Claire hadn’t been much of a weeper. Patricia had been sensitive, bursting into tears when teased. Mary had been a whiner. I’d been stoic, not crying even when I’d felt like it, but Claire had always just been…Claire. Upbeat. Sassy. Seeing her this way, I didn’t quite know what to do. Sisterhood didn’t come with a handbook.

“I am stupid!” she wailed. “I should never have believed him when he said he loved me! That son of a bitch!”

More sobs dissolved her. I got up to pour her soda into a glass with ice and stuck a straw in it, then set it in front of her along with a box of tissues and a cold, damp cloth. She looked up. Her tears had washed away the last of her eye makeup, and without it she looked so much younger it made me want to cry, too.

“Thanks.” She wiped her face and kept the cloth pressed over her eyes for a minute.

“You’re welcome.” I gave her a minute. “What are you going to do?”

She laughed like it hurt. “I don’t know. He says it can’t be his. Can you believe it? Fucking bastard prick. Of course it’s his. Fucking married bastard fucking cocksucker!”

Another flurry of sobs sputtered out of her. I didn’t say anything. After a moment, she swiped at her face.

“I didn’t know he was married, Anne. Swear to God. Fucker told me he was divorced. He lied. God, why do men have to suck so much?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Not every man can be perfect like James.”

“Is that what you really think?” I shook my head. “Claire, don’t give him that much credit.”

She gave me a small, waterlogged smile. “Is that why you’re giving his friend blow jobs in your kitchen while he’s at work?”

Claire was the only one of my sisters who wouldn’t have judged me for it. “It’s complicated.”

“Well, shit.”

I rubbed her shoulder again. “Yes, he knows.”

“And he’s okay with it?”

“He’s the one who set it up.” Bitterness twisted my mouth with the words, though I wasn’t sure why. I had wanted this, and if he hadn’t given it to me I wouldn’t have taken it.

“I knew you were kinky.” She wiped her face again with the cloth and blew her nose in a tissue. She took a long sip of ginger ale.

One laugh slipped out. “I’m still not sure I qualify as kinky.”

“Anne, two dudes? Kinky. And hot.”

We heard doors open and close again as Alex left the bathroom and went back to his room. Claire sighed, her thin shoulders rising and falling. She slumped, forehead resting in her hand.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Anne. I have one semester left of school. I have a shitty job. I can’t tell Mom and Dad about this, they’ll freak.”

“Do you need money?”

She looked up. “You mean for an abortion?”

I nodded, silent. Her brow furrowed, and she looked at her hands. She rubbed a spot where her black polish had chipped off her nails.

“I don’t think I can do that.”

I took her hand and squeezed it. “Then you don’t have to.”

She started to cry again, and this time I knew what to do. I pulled her close so she could sob on my shoulder. I rubbed her back over and over. Her tears wet my shirt.

“Whatever you decide, Claire, I’ll support you.”

“I’m so scared,” she whispered, like she was ashamed. “You don’t even know.”

I had to close my eyes then, my throat closing tight against my own tears. “Yes, I do.”

She looked up at me, then down the hall. “Not—”

“No. Michael Bailey.”

“But you were only in high school,” she said.

“And I was stupid,” I told her.

Claire sniffled. “Did you tell Mom and Dad?”

“No.”

“Did you have an abortion?”

I shook my head.

“Did you…you didn’t have the baby!”

“No. I had a miscarriage. Maybe because of the endometriosis. Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“Wow.” Claire looked stunned. “I never knew.”

“Nobody did. I didn’t tell anyone. As it turned out, I didn’t have to.”

“What did he do?”

I sighed. “He didn’t do anything. We broke up.”

“I remember when you did,” she said. “I could hear you crying at night.”

“Ahh, good times, good times,” I said with fake fondness.

We laughed. She hugged me, and I hugged her back. She drank the rest of her soda.

“Does James know?”

I shook my head again. “I never told him.”

She nodded, like that made sense. “You’d better be on the pill and use a diaphragm,” she said seriously with another look down the hall. “Imagine how fucked up that would be.”

“I told you, I’m not fucking him. It’s an…arrangement.”

Claire made one of her distinctive faces. “Uh-huh.”

“If you need a good doctor, I can recommend one.” My change of subject didn’t even play at being subtle.

“Jesus. A cooch doctor. God.” Claire put her face in her hands again. “I need one that will work on a sliding scale. I’m fucking broke.”

“She does. And she’s great. And if you need money…”

She looked around at my shabby kitchen in a house valued for sale at half a million dollars. “You’re not exactly a fountain of cash, sissy.”

“You’re my sister. If you need help—”

She shook her head and gave me a watery smile. “I’ll keep that in mind. Right now, I just need to figure out what I’m going to do.”

Whistling alerted us to Alex’s return. Wearing a dark suit with a deep red shirt and black tie and smelling of the same rosemary and lavender lotion James wore, he came into the kitchen. He looked professional, but his smirk was anything but.

“Ladies,” he said. “Try not to drool.”

Claire rolled her eyes and gave him the finger. He put a hand over his heart and staggered back. “Ouch! That hurt.”

“Act like a cocky bastard, you run the risk of being treated like one,” she said smoothly.

I was interested to see that her flirting, no matter how little she might have meant it previously, had stopped. Claire even flirted with James, though without intent. Yet she’d backed off from Alex. She wasn’t being rude to him. Just…not flirting.

He got it. I liked that about him, that he was sharp. Fast. It could be intimidating, but it was also very sexy.

“Anne, I’ll be out late tonight. So don’t hold dinner for me or anything, okay?”

“Sure. See you later.”

He nodded and saluted Claire, grabbed his car keys from the hook by the door and left.

When he was gone, she said, “My, my, my. What a picture of domesticity.”

“He was being polite, that’s all. He’s still a guest in our house.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Funny, but he doesn’t impress me as the sort who’d bend over backward just to be polite.”

For some reason, this annoyed me. “You don’t even know him.”

She shrugged. “He’s a Kennedy. And not one of the ones who fucked Marilyn Monroe, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t, actually.” I frowned so hard it gave me a headache.

“He’s got how many sisters? Three?”

“Yes.”

“Big-time sluts,” Claire said. “Into drugs. His mom works at Kroger.”

“How do you know this?” I’d gone to the same high school as James and Alex, but five years behind. We’d never been there at the same time. If Alex’s sisters had been there, they’d have been before or after me, because I didn’t remember any of them.

“We were in school together, me and Kathy, the youngest one. We were on the drill squad together. She used to talk about him. Alex. He used to send her weird candy bars and stuff like canned pig’s feet from wherever he was in China.”

“Singapore,” I corrected. “And that still doesn’t mean he can’t be polite.”

She shrugged again. “I’m just saying, his sisters were slutty and his dad’s one of those guys that hangs out down at the VFW on disability.”

I gave her a long, steady look, and to her credit she did look faintly ashamed. “I don’t think I’d be judging anyone else so harshly if I were you, Claire.”

“Yeah,” she said in a low voice after a moment. “But at least nobody pretends it isn’t true.”

Claire had been two the summer everything changed. I don’t think she could have remembered our family any differently than it was. In a way I envied her not having the comparison.

“This fucking party,” she sighed. “I can’t wait until it’s over.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Okay. I’m totally raiding your fridge.” She got up to sidle past me, but stopped. “Anne. Just…be careful. Okay? With that whole thing.”

“I will,” I assured her, though I wasn’t at all certain I could.

Even if I wanted to.

I discovered the power of an orgasm at sixteen. I’d fallen headlong into the teenage girl’s habit of spending hours staring at my face in the mirror wishing I looked more like the women in the fashion magazines and less like myself. I took long showers, standing beneath the water until it ran cold and I faced the wrath of my sisters who’d had to wait their turn. I washed my hair, shaved my legs and the places on my body where hair still seemed such an odd thing to have. I hadn’t thought much about the handheld shower other than it made it easier to rinse the shaving cream from my skin.

It felt good, that first unintentional burst of water against me. So I did it again, and held it there. A few minutes later, fireworks exploded inside me. I had to sit on the floor of the shower because my legs shook so much I thought I might fall.

I learned quickly how my body worked after that. At night, beneath the blankets and in the shower, I traversed my lines and curves and discovered all the places that felt good to touch and stroke. I learned how to prolong the pleasure until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and a mere squeeze of my thighs could keep me on the edge of coming for an hour or longer. How finally letting go could take me high and sink me low almost at the same time and leave me breathless and spent.

Michael wasn’t the first boy who kissed me, but he was the first to kiss me after I’d learned what sexual pleasure felt like. It was easy for me to put two and two together, to think about how my own hands could make me writhe and tremble and automatically assume his could do the same. In that way I was both lucky and unfortunate; my best girlfriend, Lori Kay, had also begun seriously dating a boy who wanted to push her into sex. She didn’t want to do it, not because she thought she ought to wait until she was married or anything like that, or that she was afraid of getting pregnant, because she’d been on the pill to control her periods since eighth grade. No, Lori didn’t want to fuck her boyfriend because he gave her no reason to think she’d enjoy it.

We had shared stories sitting under the big tree in her front yard, or in her basement during sleepovers. Her boyfriend was happy for her to go down on him but when he fingered her all she felt was irritated.

“Kissing’s great,” she confided. “But when he puts his hand between my legs it’s like he made a mistake on his homework and he’s trying to erase it. Rub, rub, rub!”

We laughed at that, and she marveled at my description of how Michael used his hand to make me come over and over. I didn’t tell her I already knew how it felt to climax. She’d said she never had one. We didn’t talk about masturbation.

So I was lucky in that learning my body had opened me up to having someone else know it, too, but looking back on it and the way things turned out, it might have been better if I’d been like my friend, who successfully put off losing her virginity until college.

After Michael I was sure I’d never fall in love again. I never wanted to lose myself inside someone like that again. I lost the desire to touch myself. Sex, even of the solo sort, had been ruined for me. The thought of kissing, touching, making love, turned my stomach so fiercely I couldn’t even watch romantic movies without feeling my mouth twist into a frown.

I went to college, relieved to escape my house and smiles we all put on to hide the truth. I worked hard in my classes and at the work-study programs I found to help support myself. I made friends with my roommate, a beautiful girl who had a boyfriend “back home” but who nevertheless found a lot of time to “hang out” with the entire Delta Phi Delta Fraternity on weekends. I made other friends, too, girls and guys. My dorm was co-ed and for the first time, since I had no brothers, I learned what it was like to live in proximity with boys.