Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

flask at parties or dances — you know.” She winked in a way that I thought suggested more experience with these boys and their flasks than I might have wished her to have had.

“Ah! I see. Yes, I suppose so. A sidecar. Hm. You know, I make my own version of a sidecar. Will that be all right?”

“Oh, sure.”

I made some sort of drink, and she helped, after a fashion, a delightful fashion, stretching to reach glasses on a high shelf, squatting to look into a low cabinet for a shot glass and such, and in the stretching and squatting she found many occasions to display her charms, or at least some of them, including her calves, and even her thighs, when her skirt somehow got caught on a cabinet knob as I was helping her down from a precarious perch.

Her search for the cocktail equipment and supplies required a great deal of pleasant assistance on my part. At times she leaned upon me as an aid to balance, and at other times I was required to grasp her around the waist and lift her to a height where she could see into an upper cabinet. All of this would have been unalloyed pleasure had my conscience not insisted on reminding me that I should not be finding it quite so great a pleasure as I did to have the girl next door here in my house, almost, at times, in my arms.

We took the drinks to the living room. I thought that we would sit in the chairs in front of the fireplace, the obvious and customary place to sit when entertaining a single visitor, but she settled onto the sofa and patted the cushion beside her.

“Come and sit here, Dud,” she said. “It’s more relaxing.”

Relaxing I suppose it may have been for her, but it was awkward for me. Her proximity, the drink that I ought not to have given her, the essay that I would have to help her write — these things made me increasingly uneasy. Relaxing I did not find it. Exciting, yes, agitating, stimulating, arousing; certainly not relaxing.

She actually drank the concoction that I had made. I didn’t care for it much, but I sipped at it in my worldly way, humoring this sweet girl who was pretending to a sophistication that she hadn’t earned — surely hadn’t earned.

“Drink up, Dud,” she said. She put her hand on mine and guided the glass to my lips, and I did as she advised, draining the drink.

Swallowing the last of hers, she leaned against me and said, “Don’t tell my mom,” breathing the request into my face.

“I won’t,” I said, and as soon as I had said it I was aware that I had crossed a line into a conspiracy that, in my position as friend of the family, trusted adviser, and grown man, I ought never even to have approached. In a moral sense, I was already lost, but to be truthful I must admit to you that I was more concerned about my physical situation: I was in an extreme state of desire. I will try to avoid descending into vulgarity in this account of that night, but in order for you to appreciate fully how I felt with her leaning against me like that, I must tell you that I was as upright and rigid as an oak, or perhaps an ash — one of those sturdy trees that produces the fine hardwoods so prized in cabinetry — and I didn’t want the obvious evidence of my desire to frighten or disgust the girl, certainly not to send her running into the night, screaming accusations.

Swallowing hard and buttoning my jacket over my manhood, I said, “Why don’t we go up to my study and see what we can do about that essay?”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

IN DUDLEY’S STUDY, I seemed to return to myself. I think it was the memory of the hours I had spent there being tutored by him. The subordination I had always felt during those sessions, the inadequacy I’d felt, returned when I entered the room.

“So this is your study!” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, yes.”

She walked around the room, swinging her little hips, poking at things here and there, then stopped at the window and looked out into the darkness.

“That house next door — ” she began.

“Your house,” I said.

She giggled. “Oh, of course. Of course it’s my house. That sidecar went right to my head.”

She leaned forward, toward the window — her skirt riding up so that I could see a bit of the backs of her legs above her knees — peered into the darkness, and said, “That window right across the way, what room is that?”

I went to her side and in a friendly, possibly protective way, put my arm around her waist as I leaned in a manner similar to hers to peer into the dark.

“That,” I said, my breath catching, “is your bedroom.”

She turned away from the window, toward me, and as she turned I relished (and committed to lifelong memory) the brushing caress of her hair, her breasts. Her eyes were teasing.

“Why, Dud,” she said. “What exactly do you study up here in your study?”

“Beauty,” I said, surprising myself.

“Meaning me?”

“There are nights when I sit here with the lights out just hoping that you will come up to your room.”

“Wouldn’t you rather I came here to yours?”

“That is more than I have ever allowed myself to hope. You see, hope is sustainable only when its object seems attainable.”

“Is that an aphorism?”

“I think it is, and I just made it up, just now.”

“And just now, here I am, attainable.”

She was looking into my eyes. I was looking into hers. We were breathing deeply, excitedly, our mouths nearly touching, inhaling each other’s breath, and then she kissed me, and it was thrilling, but after a single kiss, she drew away from me and looked out the window again, and, as Patti, not Ella, said,