Alex and Tess

Tommy Linarcos

©2025 Tommy Linarcos

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Three Stories

1. Coffee Pot Day

2. Pool Disguise

3. Comfort

1. Coffee Pot Day

￼

Alex and Tess left their bikes in the yard and made their way inside Alex’s house via the back door.  No one was home, or at least no one was home now, anyway.  Alex had a key, but the house was open.  The kitchen light was on, so his mother must have only gone out for a short trip.  The store, he hoped.  With his dad — his dad would had to have gone with.

This was just a mid-afternoon stop for him and Tess: get something to drink, get some snacks, then head back out for more adventures.

Tess threw her Cubs ball cap on the kitchen table, combed back her short brown hair with her fingers, and pulled open the refrigerator door to take a look at what beverages were available.  Alex, meanwhile, attempted to haul himself up on to the side counter.  He was almost tall enough — he’d just had a growth spurt, but no one could reach the top shelf.  Leaning over the counter and raising up on his toes, the Maurice Lenell butterscotch cookies were just out of reach.  The cookies weren’t hidden there, that was just their ‘spot.’  He’d use the method he’d used since he was ‘a kid’ to get up there.

“Just get the step stool,” Tess shook her head.  It wasn’t usual that she was the voice of reason.  Usually, she was the one pushing him to do something stupid, pushing a boundary.  Pushing their boundaries.

“Nah,” Alex dismissed.  The not-quite-tall-enough blonde boy put his hands flat on the counter and bounced up, his arms quickly supporting his weight easily until his left knee was on the counter, too, and then his right.  He was kneeling on the kitchen counter and could now easily access whatever he wanted.  He would take the box and hop back down.

But something happened.  Whether there was some water on the counter, or the knee patch on his pants was slick on the smooth surface, or his knee just gave way and went sideways no one would ever know.  But Alex’s left knee went that way and he went down — hanging on and off the counter like a three-pointed star.  But the coffee pot came with him, tipped over, fallen completely on its side.  The shiny silver percolator lost its lid and the steaming hot coffee spilled all over the counter and straight into Alex’s right thigh.

It was hot.  It burned.  It was burning-hot.  It was 200º burning-hot.  It soaked into his pants and it stayed 200º burning-hot.

Alex screamed, pushing himself the rest of the way off the counter, hopping on his left foot to gain some sort of balance, pushing at the wet patch of burning-hot coffee on his pants, trying to wipe it away.

Tess had to take a moment to figure out what happened.  She wanted to help, but do what?

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly since they were both eleven, each just weeks shy of twelve, they were worried about having spilled the freshly-brewed full pot of coffee.  What would Alex’s mother say?  Could they get it cleaned up in time before she got back?  Paper towels or a mop?  Was his father home, after all?  Did he hear the clatter and Alex scream?  Were they going to get in any trouble?  Could they make another pot so no one would know?  How do you make coffee?  How much coffee do you put in that cup thing in the percolator?

Even Alex’s second thought, while he was screaming, was Oh, no, look at what I did…

Fortunately, Tess’s second thought was, “Get them off!”

“What?”

Tess got to him, stabilized him, and grabbed at his waist.  “Take off your pants!  You’re burning yourself — and you’re going to keep burning!  Get them off!”

In shock, stupidly, grimacing in pain, he sat on one of the kitchen chairs and tried rolling up his pants leg, as if that would have any effect, like he could roll it all the way up to his waist past the burn.  He actually got it just above his knee before he could go no further.

“What are you doing?” Tess was confounded.  Because her leg was not on fire, she could think a little clearer.  She grabbed again at Alex’s pants, pulling open the waist button.  Her next move was to try and get the zipper down, but Alex reacted and stood up, bouncing away.

Tess was trying to take his pants off.  She shouldn’t do that.

“Get them off!”  Tess went after him, and they both wound up in his Star Wars and baseball bedroom, just off the kitchen.  She pushed him to sitting on his bed.  “Take off your pants!  You’re still burning!”

If he took off his pants in front of her, she’d see him in his underwear.  True, she’d seen him in his bathing suit, and he ran around in the yard without a shirt or shoes all the time with her in the summer, but this was his underwear.

“God dammit!”  Tess grabbed his legs and tipped him onto his back, taking his cuffs and pulling.  She got some way, but his shoes were a problem, now.  Frustrated, she went back to his hips and just yanked his jeans down.  They came down, underwear and all, and she kept pulling until the mass of wet fabric was below his knees.

Alex instinctually covered his groin, but felt the immediate drop in temperature on his thigh.  He was still burnt, but he was no longer being burned…  His hands moved to his pain, trying to appease the hurt.

Tess continued, finishing what she started.  She didn’t ask, didn’t yell, anymore, she just pulled the knots on his shoelaces and pulled off his shoes, then tugged his pants the rest of the way off.

Alex sat up a bit and, with a little presence of mind, reached down and held his underpants at his ankles, saving them from being whisked off with his jeans.  He lurched off the bed and pulled the white Fruit-of-the-Looms back up, carefully at his thighs, but back in place.

Finally, Tess asked the stupid question, “You okay?”  Of course, he wasn’t, but what else would you ask at this point?

“It hurts,” Alex groaned, back to trying to press the big red oval out of his thigh.  The burn patch was as large as his spread hand.

“You nut.”  Tess tossed his pants onto his desk chair and knee-walked over to him at the bed.  “Why wouldn’t you take off your pants?”

“I… you…” Alex started.  He wasn’t quite sure how to continue.  It all made sense now, what he should have done, but at the time…

Tess seemed to sense not his pain, but his discomfort.  “I’m sorry I saw your dick.”

But she wasn’t sorry.  When his pants came down, she stared right at it.  It wasn’t her goal, but she sure did want to see it.  It popped out, stuck out.  Head, shaft, and balls.  And he had hair — a lot, and she saw it.  She had wanted to see it for some time, now, at least since… since she had started to get a lot more curious about boys.  About Alex, in particular.  She’d wanted to see Alex naked; she just didn’t think it would happen like this.  Going swimming in the river, maybe skinny-dipping, getting pantsed in the pool, or playing Truth or Dare, but not like this.  Still, she saw it.  The picture in her mind might have to last for a while.

“I didn’t mean to, you know, you just weren’t getting your pants off, and…”

“I know.  Thanks.”  Alex was coming to his senses.  “Can you…?” his voice weak, pained.

Tess came back to crisis-aversion mode.  “Yeah, let me get you some ice or something.”  She left him and went back into the kitchen.  Stepping as she could around the giant coffee puddle, she righted the coffee pot on the counter, although the entire contents had already spilled out, and unplugged it from the wall.  The percolator’s coffee grounds cup was spilled out, too, and looked a sick mess, but she stopped herself from cleaning up any further.

She opened drawers by the sink and found dish towels, took one, ran it briefly under the water, then went to the freezer and got some ice out of the tray, wrapping several cubes in the towel.  She came back to Alex and gave him the cold, damp packet, helping hold it on his leg.  She didn’t have to do that, but still felt she was in charge of his healing.

“It’s a mess in there, huh?” Alex asked, picturing the brown lake of his kitchen floor, his mind going back to the trouble he might be in for causing it, and the loss of expensive coffee.

“Oh, yeah,” Tess confirmed.  “Is anyone else home?  Your brother or sister?  Your dad?”  To help?

Alex looked at his ceiling and the doorway, listening with his eyes.  “I don’t hear anyone.”

She took her hand off the towel, off of his thigh.  She didn’t want to go start cleaning up the kitchen.  “Is it helping?  The ice?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe?  It still hurts.  Still burns.”

“Do you guys have any aloe?  You know, like for sunburns?” she put to him, thinking forward again.

Alex’s eyebrows crunched, thinking what aloe was.  The neighbor lady had some cactus she called aloe, and he remembered her breaking off an arm one time for the goop inside when his mom burned her hand on the grill.  He didn’t have such a plant.  “Lady next door does, I think.  But,” he thought about sunburn, “I think we have a can of Solarcaine in the bathroom.”

Tess nodded and made her way there.

Alex stood and limped to the doorway, looking around the corner into the kitchen.  He could see the brown lake reaching under the table, under the chairs.  Twelve cups?  What was that — a gallon?  What was he going to do?

Tess returned with an aerosol can and a tube.  “You do have some aloe, but let’s try this first.”  She pushed him back to the bed, and he sat, removing the cold towel.  She shook the can of first aid spray, aimed it at the big red burn, and let a long, cold blast paint Alex’s thigh back and forth.  Cold like liquid nitrogen, at first, it brought some instant relief, though they both knew it wouldn’t last.  “Okay?”

“It’s a little better, I think.  For now.”  His skin was already a little stiff, and it still hurt, but he figured he could fight through it all.  He didn’t have any flayed skin that he could see, just a bright red oval.

They both looked at the doorway and knew what was next.  Tess didn’t “have” to help — it wasn’t her house, she didn’t cause it — but she and Alex were friends, thick as thieves, often were thieves, and they would do this together.

Towels was the first thought, and Tess had noticed several big ones hanging over the tub in the washroom.  She got them and they began the task of laying them out on the floor, soaking up the coffee, and then ringing them out in the sink.  They had done a good enough job that the coffee film was thin enough to start drying on the floor when Alex realized there was a sponge mop in the basement.  While he hobbled downstairs to get it, Tess wiped up the coffee grounds, and then they damp mopped the floor.  When finished, he and Tess took the mop and towels to the basement sink by the washer.  There would be no lying about this, no cover-up, but they’d done the clean-up.

Alex hadn’t bothered to put pants on during the effort.  Why bother now?  But he was distracted enough to try to clean up a pool of coffee in his socks, which became soaked immediately, so those quickly came off, then went into the basement sink, too.

While cleaning up, they finally saw the note stuck to the stove hood under a Cap’n Crunch magnet: “Took Mom to the doctor.  Be back later.  Be good.  Dad.”  The doctor’s again…

Alex sat at the kitchen table, seeing coffee streaks on the floor as he pushed back the chair.  Tess handed him a can of 7-Up.  They cracked the cans open and took a well-deserved swig.  Tess’s belch was louder than Alex’s.  They snorted a breath and started to laugh. “You know,” he sighed, “if I’d just made us some sandwiches, everything would be fine, now…”  With that idea, they raided a bag of lunchmeat and rolled some Polish ham slices and snarfed them down.

Alex tried holding the 7-Up can against his leg in place of the ice towel, but it was like a quick sting with the metal.  Tess looked at the big red patch.  “Want to try the aloe?”

“Okay, if you think it’ll do better.”  Both went back to Alex’s room and sat on the bed.  Alex put his hand out for the tube, but Tess kept it.  She got on her knees next to him and shot a liberal amount of green gel in her hand and began to apply it to his thigh.  It felt weird, the gel, but cooling.  He could definitely still feel the heat of the burn, but treating it felt good.

Tess touching him felt even better.

She didn’t quite know what to do with her left hand while her right did the work, but she wanted to touch Alex more, so she took ahold of his calf with it, as if she needed to keep his leg steady.  She noted the amount of hair on his lower leg, that which hadn’t been so…. dark? visible? thick? before.  Her hand absently started running lightly up to his knee then down to his bare foot and up again.

Tess knew her position gave her a good view of the bulges in Alex’s underwear, and especially a view of his scrotum through a gap in the leg hole.  Yes, she knew it was called that.  She’d been studying.  She could tell the outline of his dick head where it lay, too.  She knew it was called a glans, but that was even weirder than scrotum, so she wasn’t going to call it that.  She couldn’t keep rubbing the aloe in forever, but she didn’t want to stop. 

Alex didn’t necessarily want her to stop, either, so he wasn’t telling her to.  Thing was, he could tell, even through the heat, that it felt too good.  His dick was swelling.  This was giving him a hard-on.  How?  His leg was still on fire, but he was getting turned-on?  If he had been hesitant before to let Tess see him in his underwear, this was ten times more embarrassing.

And she could tell.  She could see it.

“Um, that’s probably…” he started.

“Enough?  Yeah,” she finished.  She pulled her hand away gently, trying not to remove any of the gel.  She had to remind herself to bring her other hand away, too, regretfully.

Alex breathed a silent sigh of relief.  True, he never wanted her to stop, but he didn’t know what he would do if she kept it up.

Tess looked at her hand still treated with aloe.  “Now what do I…?”  What to do with it?  Wipe it off?  Yes.  With a devilish glint in her eye, she made to swipe at Alex’s face.  He backed off, breaking into a smile.  They moved into one of their games.  Tess feinted to her right with the sticky hand, then grabbed his arm with her left.  He grabbed her right wrist and held her steady.  Each with both arms outstretched, they were back to a stalemate, and they were close.  Alex was much stronger, and Tess the tomboy was wiry and quick, but he didn’t break their hold, nor did she try any fast moves.

She couldn’t look in his eyes, that might be too weird.  Secretly, she loved his brown eyes, and his blonde hair.  He’d just got it cut, not too long ago, and it looked nice, almost feathered growing back in.  She wanted to look down at his dick again, at his hard-on in his undies, but didn’t want to be so obvious, didn’t want to get caught at it.  She looked at the horizontal stripes on his t-shirt, instead — thick blue and orange racing stripes zig-zagging like lightning across his chest, ending under short-sleeves.  No logo or character, probably something from Wards or Penney’s, but the colors were good on him.  His chest had gotten wider this year, too.  He was almost twelve, and then she would be, too.  He was growing up, but the puberty fairy hadn’t visited her, yet.  Still flat as a board, would he even look at her?

She was straining against his arms, making him use his muscles in the game, bend the elbow, straighten the arm, dip a shoulder…  Yes, she liked looking at his arms, too.  She wanted to touch him.  “I give.”  She let her arms go slack.  Now he just held her wrists, but loosened his grip, too, and let her go, but was still wary — she never gave up.

Immediately she swiped her aloe hand at his shirt, smearing it on the section below the stripes.  She missed touching his chest, but it was fun, anyway.  He gave in, and she continued to actually wipe her hand off with his shirt.  “There.  That’s all for you.”

“Thanks.  Now I have to change my shirt.”  Alex scooted forward and stood up, heading over to his desk chair.  He adjusted his briefs, hoping Tess hadn’t noticed what was happening inside.

“You were going to, anyway.  You got coffee stains on that one,” she said to his back, though her eyes were on his butt, now.  Having worn those briefs for the day, they were hanging a little loose, as she’d noted before.

“Wasn’t going to have to, not like we were going anyplace special, just back out riding.”  He picked up his crumpled jeans from the chair and hung them over its back to dry out the leg.

“Could go to the mall,” she tried.  Now that the idea was out there, she wanted him to take off his shirt.  She almost suggested ‘or the park,’ but he wouldn’t need a clean shirt for the park.  That he was now comfortable being in front of her in his underwear was making things churn inside her.  “See if anyone’s around.”

He didn’t want to turn around, yet.  His dick was still hard.  “Hey, do I do anything more with this goop, you think?  Like, if I put on my shorts, I don’t want to smear it off…”

“You got a big Band-Aid?” she joked.  “Or, maybe, like…”

He got the idea.  “Yeah.  We got some, whatyacallit, gauze stuff in the cabinet.  I’ll be right back.”  Alex took off out the doorway and disappeared into the house, rather quickly.

Tess was glad he went and not her; he might have dressed if she’d gone.  She had a moment to look around.  Nothing new.  She’d been in this room time and again over the years — her, Alex, Suzie, Joey, all playing.  Alex’s house was kind of a base for them, in the middle of all their houses.  They didn’t all hang over here too much now with his mom being sick, but Tess knew the room well.  It smelled a little different, maybe.  The window was open as it was a nice day, but the room smelled like boy.  Not the boy smell of playing rough all day in the grass and sweating, like when your mom tells you ‘You smell like outside! Go take a bath!’  But like Alex’s skin.  Like Alex.  His bed was yet unmade.  It was on the Star Wars sheets, on the pillow.  She picked up the pillow and put it to her face.  Yes, that Alex.

He came back into the room and she quickly put the pillow back, hoping he hadn’t seen her with it.  Maybe he’d just think she was ‘up to something’ like a prank, but he didn’t ask.  He sat next to her on the bed, opening the box and pulling out the roll of two-inch gauze.  She took the gauze from him as if it were still her job to help him.  He could have wrapped his leg in the bathroom and then come back, but he didn’t — he returned to do it here, so it was her job.

“Wait,” he cautioned.  “If we’re going to wrap this up, let’s put on some more aloe, to be sure.”  He reached over for the tube, but again, she took that from him, too.

She flipped the cap and shot the gel onto his thigh directly, then began spreading it out, again, not rubbing it in too much because they wanted a good layer under the wrap.  Her touching him had the same effect as before, she noted.  His hard-on wasn’t evident when he returned, but it was there, now.  She had no reason to spread the gel anywhere other than his burn, so did not let her fingers travel, or try to tickle him, but she was silently pleased to see him growing again while she did so.  It was fascinating.

“Alright,” she said, picking up the hem of his shirt and cleaning her hands, again, this time able to see his waistband and his stomach.  No.  His abs.  He didn’t have those last summer…  They weren’t deep or ‘cut,’ but it was no soft belly.

Alex pulled a foot-long section of the gauze and held it across his thigh.  Tess took the roll and wound it under his leg and back over, and they started a bandage.

“Not too tight — I just want it covered, not to cut off my circulation,” Alex warned.

They finished the binding and, not having any surgical tape, just cut the gauze with scissors from his desk and tied off the end.  “How’s that feel?” she asked.

Alex stood, tried walking with it.  “Pretty good.  The bandage, I mean.  I can still feel the burn.”

“Probably gonna hurt for a couple-few days, yet.  Take some aspirins.”

“Yeah.”  Alex looked around.  What was he supposed to do now?  Right, his shirt.  Here he was only in his underwear and t-shirt and about to change.  Should he ask her to leave or turn around?  What would be the point at this point?  This was Tess, his friend, not some weirdo.  He went to his closet, looking for what to change into, pulled off his t-shirt and tossed it into the hamper.

His back was to her.  It was a nice back, she decided, but she had to get him to turn around.  It was May; next month they’d be back at the pool and she’d see him without his shirt every day, but she hadn’t seen him like this since… “Hey.”

He turned.  “Hm?  What?”  She didn’t answer, so he turned completely and asked again.  “What?”

She didn’t have an answer.  She just stared at him.  His widening chest.  His pecs, or the thickening line of muscle that would become nice pecs one day soon, like his stomach.  His arms, his shoulders, his biceps.  And lower.  All the parts that belong to a boy.  “You have a boner, again.”  It just came out.  She didn’t know why she said it.  She just said it.  Defense?  Guilt?  Stupidity?

Alex dropped his head in embarrassment and covered his groin with his hands.  “No, I don’t.”  He turned around toward the closet.

“Yeah, you do.  It’s big.”  Why was she continuing with this?  Did she think he’d offer to show it to her if she kept this up?

“Stop making fun of me.”  Being called out on something like this only made him… upset? embarrassed?  One day, he’d like having his ‘big boner’ noticed, but now, it sounded like derision, like a cartoon, like being called out and made fun of.

“I’m not.  It’s… I didn’t mean…”  She had to find some way out of this, some way around this.  She took another drink of her 7-Up.  “I don’t mean to make fun of you.  It’s nice.”  Did she really just call his boner nice? they both thought.

He turned half-way back to her.  What was she getting at?  He was standing here almost naked in front of her, wearing as much as he would at any time at the pool.  But with an erection.  An erection she just called nice.  Part of him still wanted to just get dressed and get out of this, but the other part of him… wanted to see where this could go.  Of course he’d had thoughts like this.  Usually about their friend Suzie, but about Tess, too.  And why not Tess?  Those freckles were cute…  True, she didn’t have boobs like Suzie did, but… he still wanted to…

She made a noise that was kind of like “I… um” but was neither word.  Was she going to do it?  Go for broke? 

“Can I see it?” 

He didn’t say anything back.  She was sitting very properly, very nice, very still.  Feet together, hands in her lap, still holding the gauze spool.  “I’ve… never really seen…”  She started formulating what she’d say when he yelled ‘No!’: ‘I was just kidding,’ ‘hah! you took me seriously,’ ‘why would I want to see your dick again?’  But she realized in that instant that it would just sound more like she was making fun of him.

She looked down.  “I was… just wondering…”

Alex turned fully to her.  Was he going to do it?  Her eyes slowly ran up his body: from his bare feet to his hairy calves, his knees, his bandage, his underwear with his dick inside, his abs, his chest, his face, his nice blonde hair.

Alex felt like the right thing to do was to just say ‘no’ and put an end to it.  Get dressed and that would be it.  But he didn’t want to.  He was actually a little scared, but…  No, he was a lot scared but.  He could actually feel his erection ebbing.  He could just pull down his…  No.  He didn’t want to be made fun of, again.  He wanted to know.  He could ask her ‘why?’  That would put it off, put it back on her, again.  But she kind of just told him why.  Of course she wanted to see a naked boy.  He wanted to see naked girls.  That was it.

He made himself speak.  “Take off your shirt.”

“What?”  This took Tess by surprise.  Of all the responses, that might’ve been fourteenth on her list of what she was expecting him to say.

“So I know it’s not a joke.  Take off your shirt.”  If she did this, then he would know it was a thing between him and her, not a thing where she would point and laugh, steal his underwear and run away, pull out a camera from somewhere and take a photo.

Tess swallowed.  It was back on her.  Would she?  She had to think if he’d ever seen her without a shirt before, in whatever situation, but her mind was blank.  She knew she didn’t have much to show.  Anything to show, really.  But she was a girl.  “I don’t have any boobs, you know.”

“I know,” he said.  Not encouraging, but the truth.

“Suzie has boobs,” she played for time.

“She does.  Starter boobs.”  A joke they’d shared, even Suzie.

Tess looked down at her t-shirt.  It had an advertisement for Colton Hot Dogs and Pizza on it, a local restaurant where she knew the daughter of the guy who ran it.  White shirt.  Red collar.  Red picture and lettering.  She could call it off by refusing.  They’d both breathe and just go back to normal.

“Take your shirt off and I will,” Alex pressed.  Last chance.

That pressed her button.  She put the gauze down next to her, took ahold of her collar with both hands, and then pulled the white-and-red t-shirt off over her head.  She shook her hair and put the shirt next to her on the bed.

Alex looked at her chest.  It really was still a chest, not breasts, not boobs, not tits.  Still, those were her nipples, her… areolas?  The pointy pink circles that were always hidden behind a shirt or under her blue tank suit at the pool or the river.  She never wore a bikini, so most of her skin was a new sight to him.  It was a boy’s chest, but it wasn’t.  It was her chest and she was a girl.  Those were her girl tits.  They just weren’t big.

She couldn’t speak.  She almost said ‘what do you think?’ but she couldn’t speak.  She’d taken her shirt off, she’d shown herself to Alex, a part of her body that didn’t get shown except in the girls’ locker room.  She’d taken his challenge.  Now it was back to him.

And he knew this.  As soon as her shirt hit the bed, he knew what was next, what was expected, what he’d promised.  He felt his balls tighten up, his scrotum contract into a round package with the nervousness.  But he did it.  He grabbed his briefs with both hands and pulled them out and away from his body, freeing his cock, and pulled them down.  He felt the sting of his burn patch as the waistband came back in contact with his thigh, so then pulled out again and let the white briefs fall to his feet.

Her eyes went right to his cock.  Couldn’t take her eyes off it.  She looked him up and down again quickly, she tried to look at his entirety all-at-once, but she was locked on his cock.  That was Alex’s dick.  Same as she’d seen it before, not quite an hour ago, but different.  And it was hard.  Not straight up, but pointing at her.  And it was alive.  It was moving.  It had hair, blonde but darker than the hair on his head.  Darker like his eyebrows.  It was weird but beautiful.  He was beautiful.  This time she did look at the entire picture, this naked boy standing before her.  This was what she’d wanted, she knew.

Alex saw her looking him over.  He knew he was on display.  Was it going to be quick?  Just this glimpse?  Should he pick his briefs back up now and put them back in place?  Or could he…?  He stepped out of his underwear still at his feet and kicked them away.  He took a step toward her, away from the closet, toward the bed.  He was still looking at her chest.  He wanted to touch her.

She saw him kick away his underpants.  He wasn’t putting them back on.  He was keeping them off.  He came toward her.  His dick was getting closer to her.  It was getting larger just by proximity.  She started to reach out to it.  Like him, she wanted to touch him.  She stopped herself and figured she should ask.  He probably would want her to touch him — he was coming forward, wasn’t he? — but she figured she should ask.  “Can I touch it?”

“Yeah,” Alex breathed.  He stopped near her.  He put his hand on her left shoulder.  He wasn’t trying to guide her, she was reaching out with her right, he just wanted to touch her.  He’d said she could, so he could do this, then.  It wasn’t anything special, just her shoulder.  He’d touched that a lot of times.  But now it was her bare shoulder.

She caught his shaft in her hand and her fingers automatically closed around it.  It was warm.  It was hot.  “This is so cool,” she said, not even thinking about the irony.  It was soft to the touch but hard inside the skin.  It was getting harder.  If it had lost any of itself when he was nervous, it was regaining its strength now in her hand.  There was a light ring around it partway down; she’d ask about that, later.  The head was fascinating; that’s the part that would go in her.  If… if anything would go in her, that’s the part that would go in first.  His dick was so big, and her vagina was so…  She knew it stretched, she’d played with things.  Carefully.  But how would such a thing fit into her?

His hand moved down from her shoulder.  She wouldn’t look at his eyes, she was so taken by what was in her hand, what she wanted to see, what she wanted to hold.  He grazed by her nipple, played with it between his finger and thumb.  That got her attention.  She smiled and looked up him, pushed her chest out for him.  “They’re not much…”

“But I like them.”  His hand gently, slowly roamed her chest, while the other found her side, her throat, her ear, touching her in a way he’d never touched his friend before, but had certainly thought about late at night.  Or even on a hilltop, taking a break from riding, and he’d see the sun catch her hair in a certain way, or the way she smiled when she laughed.  Yeah, he’d thought about it, just never really thought anything would happen like this.

She couldn’t let go of him, but allowed her ring and pinky fingers to lower to his hair, graze through his pubes and pull on them, tease them between them.  She finally released his shaft and held his scrotum, still pulled together in unity, like a tennis ball in her hand.  She could feel his testes inside, though, squeezed lightly to get them to move, and smiled like she’d discovered that everything she’d ever heard about boys having balls was actually true.

“Not too tight,” he cautioned.

She remembered.  If you kicked a boy in his balls, it hurt a lot.  “So, if I crunched my hand right now…”

“It would hurt, and I would probably do something mean right back, so don’t,” he advised.  She looked up at him again with a wicked grin.  He shook his head slightly.  “You know I don’t hit girls.  Don’t make me do it by accident.”

“I wouldn’t.”  She went back to his shaft and started to stroke him; it seemed a natural thing to do.  She brought her left hand up and started running it up his midsection, touching his stomach and around to his butt and down to his thighs above the bandage.

He looked down at her.  It felt so good, what she was doing, better when someone else did it.  He didn’t think about asking her to suck on him.  That was an insult to them.  ‘Hey, suck my dick!’ was something you shouted at someone to tell them off, and cause trouble.  It didn’t occur to him that it was something for pleasure or that a girl might actually want to do.  For Tess, it did occur to her, there was a temptation to get nearer to it, something inside her associated with smell and taste, but that was something so dirty, not something she should do.

Alex was loving the sensation, even though.  He wanted more.  He was standing here naked in front of this girl and she…  “You, too,” he blurted out.

“Huh?” she asked, not getting whatever he was indicating.

“Take your clothes off.”

She heard that.  She stopped stroking, but didn’t remove her hands from him.  She had to consider the implications.  Take all her clothes off?

“I’m naked.  You should be, too.”

It made some sense.  What they were doing wasn’t “show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” but here was this beautiful naked boy in her hands and, she supposed, there should be some fairness.  It was kind of… part of… her fantasy, actually.

“What if your brother comes home?” she asked, trying to come up with — not reasons why not to do this — but whatever situations would bring everything crashing down on them, get them in trouble.  His dad and mom wouldn’t be home the rest of the night if his mom was at the doctor’s, and they both knew that meant the hospital.  She wasn’t worried, too much, about his sister — she was nice, although she still wouldn’t want to be caught naked by her.  His brother was the one she was afraid of.  He could be nice, but always looked mean.  They didn’t talk a lot.  He didn’t want much to do with a couple of 6th Graders.  But he’d be the one who’d bring the hammer down if he caught them naked.

“I’ll close the door.  He won’t care.”  Which was probably true.  Whoever got home first would be more concerned about the coffee smell in the kitchen and the towels in the basement than what he and Tess were doing in his bedroom.  They were always in his bedroom.  And they’d be more concerned about his burn than why the door was closed.

Tess reluctantly let go of Alex and shifted on the bed.  She bent over and untied her soiled, three-striped, blue suede Adidas gym shoes, which now smelled like coffee.  She pulled them off and placed them side-by-side next to the bed.  Then she pulled off her tube socks, three thick red stripes around them at the top, and placed them inside her shoes.  She gripped the carpet with her toes.  She wasn’t sure she’d ever been barefoot inside Alex’s room, but she probably had.  They did everything, all the time.  She couldn’t remember.

She sat back up.  Alex was watching her, and had taken over lightly stroking his own cock.  He was so intent on seeing her body, he didn’t even know he was stroking himself.  She stood, then, and unsnapped her jeans and pulled down the zipper the way you were supposed to, unlike how she couldn’t do that properly for him, earlier.  She held her jean waist near the pockets and pulled down, careful not to pull her panties off along with them, unlike how she had yanked Alex’s jeans and underwear down, earlier.  Once past her behind, she sat and removed the jeans leg by leg, then folded the jeans twice and placed it on the bed, putting her shirt on top of the square.

Alex watched her but didn’t ask why she was being so… organized?  She was never this way.  He knew she wasn’t trying to tease him.  If she were, she would have done something silly like dancing and gotten a laugh out of both of them.  She was taking her time, feeling a little nervous, he knew.  He’d just done the same thing.

She was down to her panties.  Based on how her socks matched her t-shirt, Alex half-expected her panties to be red and white, but no.  They were a pale blue, but with a daintily feminine white lace all along the top hem.  Who’d have expected this tomboy to have something so frilly?  Unless her mom bought them, then it was just whatever she had in her underwear drawer.

“I don’t have any hair,” she informed him, trying to reduce his expectations.

Alex nodded.  “That’s okay.”  With her not having any boobs, he wasn’t sure he was expecting her to have pubes.  Everyone was different.  She was almost twelve, but he had no one else to compare her to, outside of the adults he’d seen in Playboy, which even he knew was an unfair comparison.

She pulled down her panties while sitting.  No great show.  She got them to her knees then kicked them down and off with her feet.  Then she bent over, anyway, and picked them back up, putting them under her shirt on the pile of clothing on the bed.  She was now naked with her friend.  Boyfriend?  Probably not.  But they were best friends.

Alex couldn’t see anything.  He knew Tess was naked, but he couldn’t tell a thing about his first real life in-person pussy.  How did one ask if they can get a better look?  Like she had.  “Can I touch you?”

She nodded, then scooted back on the bed, nearer to the wall, and opened her legs.  He dropped down to his knees and leaned across the bed.  Tess’s pussy.  There might as well have been a golden light shining from it.  His eyes concentrated as he ran his fingers from bottom to top on her smooth mound, and then back down.  True, she had no pubes, but he enjoyed feeling the peach fuzz there, the kind that was all over her body, and secretly thinking, You do have hair.   He ran his finger down into her cleft and helped to split her open.  This was unlike anything he’d ever….  The insides looked so alien, yet pretty.  He wasn’t sure if her inner labia were… things… like his penis?… until he was able to assess their thickness and pliability, and found them guarding her entrance.  He’d completely missed the hood up top; the vaginal opening took all his interest because that’s what it was all about, right?  He knew she peed out of somewhere, here, too, but he didn’t want to ask questions.  The smell was different, and oddly attracting to him, but he wouldn’t have thought about licking her any more than he had of having her suck him, and she wouldn’t have prompted him to, either.

She knew he wasn’t going to hurt her, but she was uncomfortable like this, being open and on display.  “Can you come up here with me?”

Alex immediately curtailed his investigation of all things vaginal and rose up.  Tess closed up shop and moved to fix herself lengthwise on the bed.  Alex joined her, then they made things awkward as the covers were all askew; rather than fix them, Alex pulled them back and they both got inside and under the covers.  It had been getting a little chilly, anyway, being naked and all. 

They shared Alex’s single pillow on his twin bed and looked at each other.  Not deep into each other’s eyes, no lovey-dovey eternal stare, but a look like they had climbed to the top of a sand dune and discovered a secret, a glint of “guess what!” in their eyes, ready to share a joke.  They weren’t about to kiss.  That just wasn’t who they were.  Maybe someday.  Sometime.  Maybe soon.

“That was pretty,” he told her.  “You have a pretty pussy.”

She boggled her eyes.  “My va-gi-na, you mean…” she sang.

“Your cunt,” he returned in a deep, sinister growl.

“Oh, Rizzo, I love it when you talk dirty!” she recited.

“Hey, I’m Kenickie…” he laughed.

Their hands found each other, again.  It was easier being under the covers, yet somehow more difficult to explore where they wanted, and they often bumped into each other, apologized, made room, opened their legs, and otherwise tried to make parts available.  She accidentally touched his bandage three times with a sting, forgetting all about it until the next time, continually apologizing.  She was just too excited playing with Alex’s nearby cock and raking her fingers through his soft pubes.

“Okay, I have to ask,” he said, his finger going in-and-out of her hole, “how does this work?”

“Well, you’ve found the place where your dick would go,” she gave him ‘the eye’ with a grin, “but the fun bit is up here.”  She reached down and guided him north to her clitoris.  She held his finger and showed him what to do, brought him back down to steal some wetness and come back up, to make circles, to take longer strokes.

“How do I know when to do what?” he asked, sifting all this new information.

“When I do it, I just know,” she said, realizing his confusion.  “I guess, just feel how I am.”

“How about,” he brainstormed, “you tell me the speed, then.  You go faster on me when you want me to speed up, and slower when you want me to take it easy.  I don’t want to rub the poor thing off.”

They got into a pattern, and the speed indicator seemed to work, or at least they didn’t correct each other.  Alex tried to vary his movements, hoping he was doing something to make her feel good, but she wasn’t complaining.  She said they should close their eyes, and she did, but he wanted to look at her, to try to gauge how she was feeling — her “just feel how I am” sounding very important to him.

It got very warm.  They shoved the covers down to their knees.

Even though she was constantly stroking him, and it felt great, he wasn’t putting much effort into trying to get off, himself, with all of his concentration on her.  Suddenly, she was starting to buck, fall off rhythm.  He saw her face start to contort, and she made whimpering sounds like she was having a nightmare.  Afraid he was hurting her, he stopped and was going to ask if she was okay, what he’d done wrong, when she grabbed his dick hard and told him through her teeth, “Don’t stop!”

Now he understood.  She was about to cum.  Now he recognized the thrashing, the twisting, her feet on his legs.  This was exciting — watching her got his blood moving, again.  He kept up his current circling of her button, though he wasn’t sure of the speed.  He just knew he shouldn’t stop.  As she started to shake, she spoke his name.  “Alex…”  That made him harder than he had been the entire session.  As she tugged on him and her body rose, she called his name again, “Oh, god… Alex!”  Watching her spasm got his head back in the game and he started to lose it.  Sparks went off in his head and his hips started bucking just as hers were calming down.  He let go of her down below and just grabbed her around the waist and chest, pulling her tight to him and blew his load all over her hand, stomach, and hip.  He didn’t let go.  She probably couldn’t breathe, but he couldn’t let go.  He shot about seven times, he thought, and he was sorry he made a mess on her, that hadn’t been the plan, but he couldn’t let go.

“That… was awesome!” Tess pronounced to the walls.  Finally, they were able to breathe, Alex allowing some freedom.  “That was… so much… I wish you could know what it felt like inside me…”

“I have some idea,” Alex’s smile told her.  He could feel her ankle still shaking against him like little aftershocks.  He rolled onto his back and almost fell off the edge of the bed, but they both shifted and made room.  Alex found he was now laying on the roll of gauze and flipped that onto the floor.  It landed on the towel of melted ice.

She brought her hand up from below, carrying more than a fingerful of his semen.  “So this is sperm, huh?”  She held her hand up to the light coming from the window, which wasn’t as bright as it had been back when they were abusing the coffee pot, and looked at its consistency.  She brought it to her nose, but avoided trying to taste it.  The smell was new, but familiar.  Boy.  It was part of the smell of being a boy.

“Yeah.”  He hadn’t known what to do about cumming all over her, how to address it, but it sounded like she wasn’t upset.

“That was cool when you, like, shot me with it.”  She wiped her finger on his chest.  “Next time I want to see it happen.”

“Sorry.  I’ll clean you up.”  He liked the part about a next time, though.  He was going to get that wet towel when she stopped him.

“Wait.”  She turned him to look at her.  He propped himself back up on his elbow, curious.  She grabbed his face and brought it to her.  If he didn’t kiss her now, he might never do it, and now was her best chance to make him understand that.  She kissed him.  He thought it might happen, he wanted it to happen when they were holding each other, but didn’t know if he should, so when her lips met his, he kissed back.  It was a first kiss.  It wasn’t wonderful, but it was theirs.  Alex tried again, and this time was better, not all closed lips.  The third time was the best, but then they felt they needed to pull away.

Tess had a worried look on her face, but Alex smiled.  “That was fun!”

“The kiss?” she asked.

“All of it.  But, yeah.”

“Yeah, it was great…” she agreed.  “But don’t tell anyone.”

“Why?  Do you think Suzie or Joey would want to play, too?”

“No, not Suzie,” she answered too quickly.  “I mean, no, don’t tell Suzie, or Joey, or my sister, or your sister.  This is,” she put her hands on his chest, “just for me and you.  Just us.”

Her point made, she rolled over him, hitting his burn again, and got out of the bed.  She cleaned off her abdomen with the wet towel, finished her 7-Up, and they started to get dressed.  Alex found a loose pair of gym shorts so as not to contact his bandage too much, and a clean t-shirt, like he was supposed to a while ago.

“No one came home, yet, did they?” she asked, tying her shoes and taking a last look at Alex’s dick as he pulled up his underwear.

“I didn’t hear anyone,” he said.

“And you never did shut the door, anyway, so we should have heard them.”  She stood up.  “Do you want to go anywhere, still?”

“No, I should probably take a couple aspirin.”  He felt his bandage to check if it had loosened any.  “But do you want me to walk you home?”

“I’ve got my bike here.  I’ll be okay,” she snickered, and went through into the kitchen.  “My house is only a block away.  I’ve gotten home just fine for, like, a couple million times, you know.  Don’t get all weird on me just because you kissed me.”

“Oh, I kissed you, eh?” he smiled.

“Yeah, you did.”  She looked him in the eye and kissed him, again.  The fourth time was the best, now.  “See ya.”  She grabbed her cap off the kitchen table and headed out the back door.

Alex watched her navigate opening the back gate on her bike and shutting it again, then pedaling off.

He always thought Suzie would wind up being his first real girlfriend.  But it turned out that he was Tess’s first real boyfriend.

And that was okay.

2. Pool Disguise

￼

Alex waited for Tess and Suzie to come out of the girls’ locker room at Milner Pool.  He and Joey always changed quickly, easily.  The girls took their time.  Always.  For twelve-year-old boys, there wasn’t much to do.  Take off your suit, wring it out, dry off, get dressed, done.  For twelve-year-old girls… Alex had no idea what the big difference was.  He certainly knew the difference between boys and girls, and had first-hand experience with that from fooling around with Tess, but didn’t bother trying to figure out what extra stuff the girls had to do to change from a swim suit to street clothes — and even that was just sneakers, shorts, dry undies, and a t-shirt.

Birthdays had passed, school was over, summer had begun, and the pools were open.  Alex’s coffee burn wasn’t completely healed, yet: the burn patch on his right thigh was still pink and no hair would ever grow on that part of his leg again, but he no longer had to wear the bandage.  He was afraid the wound would prevent him from the first couple of weeks of swimming, but it had healed enough that such didn’t happen.  Truth be told, he probably would have just taken the bandage off, anyway, to go in the pool, no matter what.  When the sun hit it directly, it did sting, like a healing sunburn, and he knew he had to go underwater or get out of the sun.  His brother actually took him to Sportmart with him to get some new trunks for the season, and he was able to get a nice blue pair that hung low and covered most of the scar.

Day Swim had ended, Adult Swim had begun, and every kid got kicked out of the pool.  That was the daily schedule, until Night Swim, later.  Timing was right — ‘Go get home for supper, kids, let the adults have some time without you playing Corner Tag and Marco Polo!’  Walking home with their towel rolls, when they reached their street, Tess stayed with them, instead of turning left to her block, so Joey got home first, this time.

Suzie took notice.  “We doing anything, today?”

“You want to?” Alex asked her.  Tess looked to her, too, but not with an inviting look.

“After supper, maybe, but I’ve got to go in.”  They’d reached Alex’s house.  “Besides, you two want some alone time, dontchya?”  She smiled at them and bounce-ran to her own house a few doors away.  She was inside before either of them could say anything except to each other.

“She knows,” they said simultaneously.

Tess crumpled her eyebrow in thought.  “But she probably doesn’t know what we do in our alone time…!”

Alex looked to his door.  “Let’s find out who’s home at my house, then!"

* * *

Turned out, only his sister Karin was at home, and she was on the phone in her room.

Alex’s mother was pretty much in the hospital all the time, now.  His dad was either at work, stopping home quickly and checking-in, or with his mother at the hospital.  His brother Peter was “in-charge” at home during these times, but he was rarely at home, leaving Karin to look after Alex.  Both of them had their social lives, too, so they’d schedule whether there would be a dinner that day or if everyone just had to fend for themselves.  Consequently, when he and Karin went shopping, they bought a lot of fresh fruit, pot pies, frozen pizzas, canned soups, SpaghettiOs, mac and cheese, and sandwich makings.

Alex had turned twelve in May.  It was an odd time.  He had a girlfriend who he was having sex with on a regular basis, but he loved the Star Wars Death Star playset he got for his birthday and played with on a regular basis, too.  Both he and his girl loved making the other cum, but also riding their bikes on the dirt trails in the forest.  He hadn’t fucked his girl, yet, but he also hadn’t hit a home run for his Little League team this year, yet, either.

He and Tess never kissed in front of anyone, they didn’t hold hands, or make goo-goo eyes at odd moments.  When they were with their friends, that was the time for having fun with friends, being a part of the group.  Tess could do girl things with Suzie, Alex could do boy things with Joey, and they could all play together.  Joey was a couple years younger, but that didn’t even make a difference, at least this year.

The Alex-Tess sex thing never came up until they were alone.  Even so, it was still just something to do if they were able.  It was one of their favorite things to do, but they knew there wasn’t always a good time or place to do it.  And sometimes there were better things, like swimming or riding bikes or getting a game of softball going in the lot.  Or playing Clue by candlelight with the others when there was a blackout from a big thunderstorm, like last week.

* * *

“You were looking at Suzie today,” Tess accused Alex, while she gave him a hand job in the middle of his bed, sitting on her knees next to his stretched out naked body.

“I look at Suzie every day,” he told the naked girl on his bed.

“I mean you were looking at her in her swimming suit, like you want to see her without her swim suit.”

“I…” Alex faltered.  He’d been near getting to that exciting point in the hand job, but Tess threw the curve ball at him.  “I won’t lie.  I would like to see Suzie naked…”

Tess thought she had him by asking him during the hand job, but he actually thought about his answer.  And he was honest about it.

“I don’t think she’d do it,” Tess thought aloud.  She did a lot of her thinking out loud.  “Not that she’s a ‘good’ girl, but I don’t think she would.  She’d be too afraid of getting pregnant.”

“You trying to get me to not ask her if she wants to play?” Alex smiled.  It would be fun to get Suzie to join, but he wasn’t going to push it, wasn’t going to give up what he had.

“I told you before, when we do this, this is just for us.  If you want to see other naked girls, you guys got magazines in Joey’s garage.”

“That’s not the same,” he said, stroking her neck down to her nipple.

She looked at the wall across from his bed. “And you’ve got Cheryl Ladd.”  He had the red Cheryl Ladd poster up next to his Chicago Cubs.  His brother had Farrah Fawcett, of course, but his mother had only let him have Cheryl because she didn’t show nips like Farrah did.  “You jerk off to Cheryl a lot?” Tess asked, continuing her smooth stroke on him.

Alex, eyes closed, smiled and admitted, “Sometimes….”

“What about other times?”

“I think of you and Suzie, things that could actually happen…”

“Me and Suzie…?”  Tess got a devilish thought.  She leaned down to his ear.  “I’ve touched Suzie’s pussy, you know, and she’s touched mine.  At a sleepover…”

Alex drew in a sharp breath, his muscles tightening all along his body.  Tess kept him hard.  She learned in the last few weeks not to just pump him as hard as she could, not to strangle his cock like it owed her money.  She kept a loose grip that teased his skin as her hand rose and fell, playing with the line of skin from his head to his circumcision scar. 

She looked down at the dick in her hand.  She figured Alex was about five inches long.  She had a Snoopy 3x5 notebook at home, and she compared it to her hand, then put her hand to his cock today, and that was about right.  A lot of soft, brown hair — blonde but dark like his eyebrows. 

Alex started pumping his hips with her, trying to dictate a rhythm, add some activity instead of just being passive.  Tess got the idea and paid attention.  He gripped her ankle, letting her know his intensity.  She was on her knees to his right, so he couldn’t play with her pussy.  Right now, this was all about him, but it would be her turn soon enough.

She stroked his chest with her left hand, tweaking his nipple, following the ridge of his developing pec muscles.  She loved that she could do that, now.  That she could touch him like this.  She leaned in closer.

“I want to fuck you,” she said to him quietly. 

He started shaking, his hips got erratic, his left foot twitching, his head thrown back into the pillow. 

“I want you to fuck me, Alex.” 

Then he lost it.  One shot of pearly cum shot out an inch, announcing his orgasm, then the second shot had the height — a genuine foot above him — she had to pull her head back to avoid getting hit.  This is what she wanted to see!  “Oh, yeah!  Fuckin’ cum for me, Alex!”  She kept pumping as that was her job, letting the next five shots fountain up all over his belly and her hand.  She didn’t let go of him, but she’d learned to ease off, just go slower, down to neutral, friendly.

His eyes were closed.  He wouldn’t see her.  Quickly, with her left, she took a fingerful of his cum off of her right hand, and brought it to her mouth.  It smelled the same, but she’d wanted to taste it.  She hesitated, though; she didn’t want him to see.  Before she could think more, she put her finger in her mouth and licked it off.  It was different, kind of plain, like wafer, but it did have a taste, a little tangy, actually.  She’d heard it was supposed to be salty.  Did everyone taste different?  She thought on it.  Blood would probably taste the same from everybody, that sticky metallic taste.  Spit… did it even have a taste?  When she kissed Alex, he had a taste, but she didn’t think it was his spit.  This stuff in her mouth now was very personal, so probably?  What would…?  He wasn’t allowed to drink a lot of soda.  The Coke in the fridge was his brother’s ‘private stock,’ even though they stole one from him last week.  Alex mostly drank orange juice his sister made from the frozen things, and Hi-C.  And Gatorade and water when he played baseball.

Alex’s eyes were open.  He was smiling.  “That was a good one!”

“Looked like it!” she smiled back.  “I love to watch that, when you explode!”

“When you told me to fuck you… that got me!”

“I do want to try it.  I want to know what it feels like,” she told him, whispering, like it was a secret.

“Me, too, but I’m still nervous about that,” he admitted.

She removed her hand from his cock, making a comic ‘yuck!’ sound, and found his shirt on the floor to wipe up with.  She wiped him off, too, looking for every little bit and where it landed, then played with his dick just a little more.  It was still hard, but bendable, now.

She liked seeing his cock head pop in and out of her fist.  It was kind of funny.  She thought about taking a Flair marker and drawing a smiley-face on the flat side of his dick head, and she would see it smile at her as it came in and out of her hand.  When she first thought of that, she’d laughed so hard it ended their session.  Alex thought she was laughing at him, again, and had pulled his pants up.  She had to explain what she was laughing at; he got a laugh out of it, too, but forbade her from actually doing it.  ‘Guys look at other guys’ cocks in the showers.  I don’t want to have to explain it.  Someone will tell the girls, and everyone will be pointing at me the rest of the week,’ he’d told her.

But now, while still playing with him, she asked, “You look at guys’ dicks?”

That caught him weird, but he figured there was something more to that, not accusing him of anything.  “Not really, but everyone does.  You check each other out, make sure you’re normal.  It’s no big deal,” he shrugged.

“Yeah, girls, too,” Tess agreed.  She had seen others pass her in development this year, still flat-chested and without pubes, but she wasn’t alone.

"But in 5th Grade, me and two other guys were the only ones to have hair on our dicks, so everyone was checking us out.  I knew every guy there was looking at my dick when I headed into the showers,” Alex shook his head.

“Which two?” Tess asked with genuine girl curiosity.

“Scott and Phil,” Alex answered matter-of-factly.

“You know, I don’t get to see any other naked guys.  And there’s not any magazines with naked guys in them.”  She thought there probably were magazines like that, but she’d never seen any, and there weren’t any stacks of naked guy magazines in any of their garages.

“You got Stallone up on your wall,” Alex pointed out.  “And that singer.  Leif?”

“Not Leif.  Andy Gibb.  I don’t like Leif.”

“There’s plenty of boys… at the pool,” Alex noted, relaxing, getting into the game, enjoying Tess’s attention.  “Guys don’t wear much, and you can see their dicks just like the girls’ tits in their bikinis.”

“Can’t actually see ‘em, but you know they’re there,” she agreed.  “It’s not just boys’ dicks, it’s the whole package — their arms, their shape, their whole bods.  Always hidden at school, but at the pool, it’s all on display.”

“That’s why you like me, you dirty girl,” Alex teased.

Her eyes roamed, looking at her boyfriend until she landed on his smile.

“I lov-  I do like to watch you take off your shirt,” she hummed.  “Just something about it.”

He put his hand to her cheek.

She took a deep breath and corrected herself.  “Now if only I could sneak into your locker room…” she started dreaming.

“You did, once,” he reminded her.  “At the pool?”

“That was last year, just at the exit out to the pool.  Suzie and I peeked into the guys’ shower right there.  We saw that one lifeguard naked.  His dick was huge and hairy and ugly!” she recalled, chuckling.

“That guy with the mustache, you said.  He was old, like eighteen or twenty.”  Alex thought about something, gazing at her chest.  “You still don’t have any tits, yet,” he told his flat-chested friend.

“I know.  Thanks for pointing that out.”  She threw the shirt at his face.  She figured it was her turn, next.  How did she want it?  They’d tried oral sex once, though neither of them was very good at it, yet.  Still, it was fun learning.

“And sometimes, people who don’t know you think you’re a boy.”  She had short brown hair, was fairly thin, no girl curves, yet.  Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, never a skirt.

“Yeah…?”

“If you really wanted to…. What if… you snuck into the boys’ locker room, pretending to be a boy?”

The wheels started turning in her head.

She began moving, slowly, carefully, but unconsciously.  Her eyes saw the Cubs and Cheryl and Star Wars posters around his room, his baseball bat with his mitt hooked over the top, but she didn’t see them.  She climbed on top of him backwards, sitting on his waist, and lay down, her back on his chest, her head off his left shoulder, carefully finding the spot for her legs next to each of his, his mostly-soft-for-now cock in the space beyond her pussy — but she barely knew she’d found her position.  She was coming up with a plan.

He wrapped his left arm around her chest, held her in place, caressed what would be her breasts one day, pinched her nipples, kissed the back of her shoulder and what neck he could reach.  “Everyone sees the tomboy.  Only I know how much of a girl you really are…”  His right hand found her pussy, and began the soft stroking, tight little circles, and frequent dips inside her like she’d taught him to do.  He was speaking softly to her, mostly ‘there you are’ and ‘you’re so wet’ and little things like that.  She heard him, and responded to his touch, but there were two things going on in her brain: Alex’s fingers and the Plan.

I could go to the pool topless, and no one would know…  But not Milner Pool, ‘cause everyone would know me there…  No…  Go to Hayden Pool on the other side of town…  Nobody from our school lives there…  Or Clarke Pool…  No…  Hayden Pool.  I could go with Alex… in the boys’ locker room… he’d protect me.  I could wear his suit…  One of his suits…  Maybe the green one…  Swimming without a top would be so… and then later… when they kick us out… either at the end of Day Swim… or… at night… at the end of Night Swim…  in the locker room… all the boys would be changing… oh my god… all the boys would be naked… and I’d be there…

From her ideas and from Alex’s fingering, she began to whimper.  She shut off her planning and focused on Alex, what he was doing to her.  His left hand had left her chest and was working her clit at the same time as…

“If I fuck you, I might be too big for your little pussy.  This pretty little pussy.  Maybe… maybe you need two fingers in here, to be sure…” he whispered, as he inserted a second finger and swirled them in the ridges and hills inside her.

She bucked and squirmed.  She’d found a comfortable spot in locking her arms backwards and underneath him, her hands under his butt, so she was exposed to the ceiling and couldn’t escape, by her own design, straining against her own trap.  “Oh, Alex… Alex…  Are you really gonna fuck me?  You’re gonna fuck me, right?”  She knew his cock was rock solid now; she could feel it against her leg.  It was close to her pussy.  Was it close enough?

“Yeah, I’m gonna fuck you…”  He tried pushing his cock toward her from underneath, but her squirming kept her at just enough distance for zero contact.  He tried pulling, goading, her with his hands to scoot lower on him, but she was too far gone. 

“Oh, god!….” she called in a strangled sound as the sun exploded inside her, her legs started shaking, and her juices flowed out like a brook over Alex’s hand.  She bucked on top of him, and finally unlocked her arms from below to regain some balance, one hand clutching the bed, the other digging into Alex’s side.  She didn’t have to tell him to slow down or stop as he’d had enough.  He’d disengaged down below and slipped her off him to his left side, and quick-spun on top of her.  She spread her legs and let him in.

Except Alex’s twelve-year-old cock never made it in to Tess’s twelve-year-old pussy.  It was so wet and the target so elusive, without aid his cock slid right under her and he humped the bed for all he was worth, finishing seconds after starting, cum all over her asshole and the bed.  Tess never even got a chance to tell him he hadn’t made it in, she was still floating in her orgasm.

After calming down and breathing, Alex looked up at her.  “I don’t think I got it in.”  He was embarrassed, but hoping to find some humor in it.

“No, you didn’t,” she smiled at him.  She grabbed his face and pulled him up the last few inches and they made out in celebration of cumming.  Then she released him, her face showing how happy he made her.

“Well, at least you’re not…” he didn’t finish, just took a deep breath and flipped over, sharing the space of the twin bed.

“You came all over my ass,” she told him.  “You gonna wipe my ass?” she laughed.

“Um, no, I guess you can probably take care of that better!”  He was still a shade of red, but glad they could laugh.

“Find me your shirt.”

“Oh, and I liked that shirt, too,” he said, reaching behind them to where the shirt had been shoved earlier.

“It’s your cum shirt, now.”  She took the shirt from him, but did not get busy right away.  “Hey, that was incredible, my orgasm.  You really got me!”

“You’re welcome.  Glad to return the favor.”

“And listen, I got an idea.”  She turned toward him, absently holding his dick, again, so she had his attention.  “When you said I could go to the pool disguised as a boy…”

For the next twenty minutes or so, she told him her idea, and he found the wobbly points of it and came up with ways to get around them and make it work. 

She couldn’t use her own pool pass — it was pink and had a big F under ‘Sex.’  “I could just tell them they gave me the wrong pass because I went there with my sisters and they thought we were all girls,” she tried.

Alex tossed that down.  “No, that’ll make them suspicious.  We don’t want them to give you a second look.  Just that you’re a boy and go on in.”  They either had to go get her a new pass — a blue M pass — for $10, or find out how much a guest day pass cost.  “Because you’ll be my friend from Wisconsin or something.”

She was fine to use his green suit from last year.  After his growth spurt, it didn’t fit him too well anymore and should do fine with her slim hips.  But she didn’t have a dick.  They’d just been talking about how girls could see the size of a boy’s package, and…

“Can I stuff it with a sock?” she joked.

“Maybe,” Alex studied her.  “You could wear my supporter from gym class, with the sock in it.  That would work.”

“What if it falls out?”  Her question made a lot of sense.

“I can stitch it in, or you can wear my old Speedo to hold it all together under the green suit.”

They got busy trying everything on, and it looked like it would work.  She thought about just wearing the Speedo underneath with the sock in it, but if it fell out, then things might go south.  All done, her suit wore a little bulky, but it worked.  And it was dark green, so no see-through.

Alex put some clothes on and got his mother’s sewing kit, which she would never use again, he knew, and ran a stitch through the balled sock and the supporter enough times to keep it in place.  It worked, but Tess figured she’d still do the complete get-up.

“What else?  What else?” he asked, tapping his dresser.  “What are we forgetting?”

“Just…,” she thought out loud, “find a locker at the end for a good view!”

Alex sighed a chuckle.  He was going to help his girlfriend see a bunch of naked boys.  “You better tell me which girls at school have pussy hair for all this…”

“Like MaryAnn Fabricio?” she kidded about a girl who already had very large breasts.  “It’s like a forest!  Thigh to thigh!”

Alex shook his head, conjuring the image, not quite sure if he wanted to know about that one.

“Next time we ride our bikes to Turtle Creek, I’ll tell you about ‘em all…” Tess promised.

Tess finished getting dressed and was about to head for home when there was a knock on Alex’s bedroom door.  “Hey, you two done foolin’ around in there?”  Alex’s sister Karin.

Tess looked guilty.  “Uh-oh!” she giggled.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

With that permission, Karin opened the door, but was still surprised to find them together, holding each other at the elbows.  Karin was a female version of Alex, three years older and even better looking.  She briefly noted the condition of the room and the sewing kit out and… recognized something in the scent of the room, too, but didn’t say anything.  “Hey, thinking about dinner.  You hungry?”

“You know I am,” Alex answered.  “You want to stay?” he asked Tess, but she declined as, if she left right now, she’d be in time for her own dinner and not in trouble with her mother.  Karin left Alex’s door open to air out.

Alex walked Tess to the front door and tried to hide a kiss goodbye, but found he was unsuccessful.  “Now Karin knows, too.”

Alex and Karin lit the oven and put extra toppings on their frozen pizza.  While waiting, Karin noted, “Hmm.  I always thought Suzie would be your first girlfriend.”

“I thought so, too.  But, you know, Tess said ‘Hey, you’re my boyfriend, now,’ and… there you go,” Alex laughed.

Karin pretended outrage.  “Why, that brazen hussy!”  Before the pizza was ready, Karin turned to Alex, serious.  She didn’t address the possible physical shenanigans behind a closed door, but warned, “Hey.  If you’re gonna have a girlfriend…  I know it’s hard for boys to not be obnoxious, but don’t be a jerk.  Don’t hurt her, now.  Tess may seem all tough on the outside, but inside… she’s a little fragile.”

“Don’t worry.  She’s my friend, first.”

* * *

Alex and Tess didn’t get to put their pool plan into action for a little while.  Alex’s mother was taking a turn for the worse, and she wasn’t going to be coming back home to rest before her next treatments.  He, Karin, and even Peter wound up spending as much time as they could in the hospital as a family.

His mother looked so weak.  She used to be so radiant — a true lady, younger than his father, graceful, so full of life.  Karin wished she looked as beautiful as their mother.  She could play in the yard with them all, too, even tag football on Thanksgiving, or volleyball on the beach.  Reading at bedtime.  She gave them trust and freedom to roam the neighborhood, yet somehow always knew where they were.  She knew their friends, and their friends liked her, too.  And she always, always, knew when they were lying, so they stopped trying.  And now, with the cancer…  It wasn’t her, anymore.  That’s what Alex hated most about this.  He didn’t understand what all the treatments were about, but he knew they had taken his mother away.

Things started improving on the third day, and Alex got some time alone with his mother.  “So, Karin tells me you have a girlfriend, now.”

“Yeah, kind of,” Alex grumbled, caught out again, and reacting like a twelve-year-old would who didn’t want to admit anything.

“Suzie?” his mother smiled.

“Tess.”

“Really?” his mother croaked, surprised.  “Okay.”

Alex just rolled his eyes and smiled.  Why did everyone react that way?

“Well, make sure you treat her nice.  I raised my boys to respect women.  If there are… dark times or arguments, don’t you hurt her.”

“Mom,” Alex whined, “we’re not getting married.  We’re just good friends, who… kiss a little.”  He gave her his secret smile.

“Of course.  And there will be others.  You’ll find love… and heartbreak.  But you’ll find the one.  You might have to travel far to find her, or she might be next door, but look for the good, the specialness inside a girl, not just what’s on the surface.  Make sure she’s your friend.”

“Mom?” Alex got worried.  “Why are you telling me all this now?”

“Because you never know.”  She sniffled.  “If my boy is growing up, I want to make sure I’ve given you what advice I can.  Life’s not all baseball and swimming.”  She smoothed his blonde hair down.  “Now, go away, I’m tired and need some rest.  I’ve got procedures this week, and they look promising, so go out and have fun.  I’ll be ready to see you again on Thursday.”

Alex nodded.  He got to her room door, turned, and said, “Mom?  I’m going to be okay.”

“I know you will.  See you on Thursday.”

Alex still stood at the door.  “I don’t want to say good-bye.”

His mother grimaced.

“I’ll just say good night, okay?” he suggested.

She tried to smile as best she could.

“Good night, Mama.”  Alex turned and left the room.

* * *

Alex cried his eyes out that night.  It wasn’t his first time crying since his mother had started the chemo or whatever it all was, but he wanted it to be the last time in his life.  And in the morning, the sun still shone, and the world hadn’t come to an end.

* * *

“You want to do it today?” Tess asked.  She’d invited herself over at 10:00am.  She knew she was welcome and barely knocked on the door.  The back door was always open and the screen door let in the breeze, and she found Alex making a bowl of Cap’n Crunch to eat while he watched The Price is Right.  She found a bowl for herself, but took Karin’s box of Special K, instead.

It was a good day to go swimming.  He didn’t have batting practice or a ball game, so it was a great day to sleep late and he was free the rest of the day.  “You want to do it this afternoon?  Day Swim, out by dinner?  Or tonight?  Night Swim, out at closing?” he put to her, pushing his cereal down into the milk.

Tess thought on it.  “Which will be better?  More boys?  I mean, that’s the point.”

“There’s more little kids at Day Swim.  Have to be over twelve to go to Night Swim, and everyone pretty much stays through to the end at nine o’clock,” Alex advised.

“So, right, older boys…” Tess knew.

“We have to go to the Park District place and get the pass, first, so we’ll see how much time is left for Day Swim, if you want,” Alex said.

“Why aren’t you eating your cereal?” Tess asked.

“Not soggy enough, yet.”

“But it’s Cap’n Crunch…?”

“Better when it’s soggy.”

“I’m gonna steal your crunchberries.”  She plucked three crunchberries out of his bowl and added them to her Special K.  “Hey.  Do you like me?”

“What?  Of course, I like you.”  He wasn’t sure how that came out from stealing his crunchberries, though.

She spoke, but looked at the TV.  “I mean, you know.  We started messing around, but… and then we kissed.  And the kissing seems like it’s… more personal than the… other stuff.”  She looked to him.  “So, do you like me?” 

He had to think this one.  “Really, I never thought I’d even get a girlfriend until I was in high school.  I mean, you and Suzie are my best friends — there’s always been some others like Bobby and Danny and Joey, but you guys have always been there.”

“You like Suzie better?  She’s prettier, with her long, red hair.”

“Suzie’s very pretty,” Alex did not deny.  “But you and me, we do everything together.  You’re my best friend.  Who else would I like?”  He knew it wasn’t the answer she was looking for.  “I don’t really know about love and stuff.  This is all kind of… new?  And a little scary, I guess.  But Tess,” he made sure she was looking at him instead of her cereal, “yeah, I like you.  Like you, like you.”

Tess visibly let out her breath.  “You probably knew I liked you all year.”

“No, that went over my head.  Kind of surprised me on Coffee Pot Day,” he admitted.

“Boys…” she shook her head.  “Over your head…  Yeah, that’s why you play third base, now.  Eat your damn cereal!”

Alex laughed and ate his damn cereal.

* * *

The Park District office didn’t have actual day passes for the pool, though they thought it was a good idea.  The lady could sell them a Daily Pass at $3.00 plus 50¢ at the pool every day “Ted” went.  Alex was hoping they would only have to spend a dollar, but between them they had the three dollars.  The lady asked about residence, which is why you always brought a parent with, but Alex re-explained that “Ted” didn’t live in Colton — “he” was visiting, and which is why they hoped for a day pass.  “He” was only here this weekend and Alex wanted his friend to join him in swimming.  The confusion helped, and “Ted” got a blue Daily Pass with “his” photo on it, using Alex’s address from his blue Season pass, and the lady only took $1, after all.

They decided on Night Swim.  After dinner, Tess came over to Alex’s to change into the “boy suit,” topped off by a pair of his gym shorts, and they rode their bikes to the other side of town to Hayden Pool.  They were admitted with no questions asked, other than for the 50¢ copayment.

Alex led the way into the boys’ locker room.  It was a standard locker room, looking identical to the girls’ locker room at Milner Pool, the only real difference being the urinals on the washroom wall and lack of girl stuff boxes.  They’d missed the 6:30pm rush, so it was fairly empty, just a couple of boys and one old man finishing up and leaving for the pool.  Alex chose two empty lockers like Tess had specified — at the end of the row so she could have a good view without turning her head left and right. 

She watched Alex pull off his t-shirt and smiled to herself.  She wanted to reach out and run her finger down his spine, but knew she had to keep playing “Ted.”

They put away their sneakers, towel rolls, and shorts, then it was time for Tess to take the next step.  She pulled off her t-shirt with relative ease, but the moment was not lost on her: she was a girl and going topless.  They set their combination locks and were on their way.

They sprayed down in the shower then stepped out the shielded door onto the pool deck — Tess’s next big moment: topless in public.  No one gave her a second look.  Some might have thought ‘who is here? someone I know?’  But none were pointing and saying, ‘Hey, there’s a flat-chested girl pretending to be a boy! Call the cops!’

She smiled at Alex, and they went swimming.  With the low sunlight and not knowing anyone, it was just another evening at the pool.

Alex actually recognized several boys from the Little League as those kids came from all over town, but again there was no issue.  They didn’t recognize Tess.

A while later, Tess pulled Alex aside to mention, “This sock is heavy.  It’s soaked through.  I can feel it weighing me down.  I’m glad I have the Speedo on underneath.”

Alex advised, “You’re allowed to grab your ‘balls’ and give it a squeeze to let the water out.  It’ll probably make you look more like a boy!”

Tess did, and they both had a good laugh at it.

She made two trips into the locker room.  Once to use the washroom, definitely needing a closed stall with all her equipment, the other time to check out changing action when some cute boys were leaving early.  She went to her locker and pretended to put something in her mouth, like it was time for her prescription meds.

When she came back, she found Alex in the water, hanging onto both gutters in the shallow corner.  She dropped into the pool and saw an odd look on Alex’s face.  “I know I just asked you about liking me,” she said in close proximity, “and here I am checking out boys.”

“But I know that’s why we’re here.  It’s kind of fun, all this sneaking around.  It’s the kind of thing we’d do!  And only I know my girlfriend is half-naked in front of everybody!” he whispered back to her.  “But it’s not like I can pretend to be a girl and do this the other way around.”

“I suppose you want me to let you see Suzie naked, now,” she sighed.

“Just tell me what she looks like.”

Tess considered.  “Her tits aren’t that big, yet, you know that, but her nipples are really round, like big.  They’re… really light pink.  Lighter than her lips.  She has a cute red fuzzball at the top of her pussy, same color as her hair, but it’s starting to come in thicker.  You’ve seen her butt, her suit doesn’t hide it.”

“I will… think about that sometime when I’m alone!” Alex said and dunked himself under.

When he surfaced again, Tess got close.  “I dare you to kiss me,” she said in his ear.

Alex backed off.  “Are you crazy?”

“Chicken?” she teased.

“You’ll blow our cover,” he whispered back.

Tess did a quick breaststroke and made to plant a kiss on his cheek.  Alex reacted and gave her a big shove, knocking her onto her back, and then she submerged.

A guy sitting on the edge, who looked about fifteen or sixteen, asked Alex, “That kid just try to kiss you?”

Alex realized his fear of getting caught, but was on his game.  “Oh, he’s just kidding me about this girl I like.”

“Is he a fag?” the guy asked.

This was worse; Alex hadn’t thought about anything going this way.  “No, he’s okay.”  Alex almost followed that with ‘he’s just a little weird,’ but was glad he didn’t.  Tess had resurfaced at that point and the distraction stopped him.  He had to end the conversation with this guy, though, and he spoke loud enough for Tess to hear.  “He just has to figure out that girls aren’t yucky, anymore, if he ever wants to get a girlfriend.”

Tess caught on and flipped Alex off.

Alex stroked away from the side, heading toward the ladder by the diving boards.  When Tess caught up to him, he told her, “Watch that.  They’ll try to get you.”

“What are they gonna do?” she challenged.

“Pants you in the locker room, probably,” he warned.  “Then throw you into the showers or back out the exit onto the pool deck.  Then… you know… they’ll figure you out.”

She gave him her worried eyes. 

He held her arm under the water.  “I won’t let that happen.”

Tess looked in his brown eyes and knew that he wouldn’t.  He might start a fight even with the older boy, and wind up getting his lights knocked out, but he wouldn’t let anyone touch her.  She nodded and took the warning, then watched Alex climb out of the water and perform a not-too-bad dive off the low board.

About a quarter to nine, people started disappearing, heading into the lockers to change and head out into the night.  Tess knew this was the moment she’d been imagining.  They made their way inside.  Five of six shower heads were taken by boys warming up or rinsing off chlorine.  Three still wore their suits, two were naked.  Alex became a third naked boy, rolling his suit and squeezing it.  Tess’s eyes belied that this was what she’d wanted to see.  She realized then that it would be better if she knew who all the boys were, but they were still fun to look at.

Just before they got to their lockers, Alex advised, “Take your time.  Dry down with the towel, or go change in the washroom and come back, otherwise, just dry your suit best you can.  Dress slowly.  Sit on the bench and work on a knot in your shoelace — something that takes time and makes sense.”  She did that and must’ve dried her hair three times.

Their locker row was full.  Had to be twenty to thirty boys there in stages of undress, each one naked at some point, except a couple who were staying in their suits like she was.  Mostly teenagers and kids their age, a few adults.  Some turned away showing her their butts, some pointed her way showing her their cocks, some in profile showing how far their cocks stuck out.  Hairy, hairless, small, big, bigger, tiny.  She didn’t want to stare, but how could she not?

There were two boys whose dicks looked like elephant trunks; Tess didn’t want to point them out to Alex, but she’d have to ask him about that, later.  One boy had a boner, and his two friends teased him about it, but the boy just took it and laughed back.  He actually hung his towel on it!  The secret life of boys…

That one guy was not in their row of lockers, but Alex kept a watch to the side of the next row, just in case.

Alex had recognized the Turczyn brothers from their school were there, a couple of 8th Graders, twins, but they didn’t recognize him.  They were 8th Graders — 6th and 7th Graders were beneath them.  Tess knew who they were, and now she’d seen the Turczyn brothers naked.

She looked back at her Alex, standing naked next to her, drying slowly.  He had a good amount of hair above his dick, but none on his balls.  She glanced sideways at the row of boys, judging, again.  Alex had more hair than a lot of the boys, but wasn’t hairy like some of the high schoolers.  She decided she really liked Alex’s dick.

At some point, everyone got to be in a stage of ‘dress,’ and the locker room was emptying.  Alex was dressed.  He’d taken longer doing so than he’d ever done before.  He’d put on his dry underwear and wrapped his suit in his towel, they rolled their towels, and were wasting time so Tess would get everything she came for.  They picked up their passes at the cage, unlocked their bikes, and rode out of the fences away from the pool.

“That felt really cool!” Tess said when they finally were a good distance away on their bikes.

“You’re gonna get off on that for a long time, right?” Alex laughed at her.

“I mean,” she searched, “other than seeing all those naked guys, it was…  Like girls aren’t allowed to take our shirts off in public, so… it was… like free…”  Then she fell into making fun of the hippies that still roamed the neighborhood, “It was like freedom, man!  Like ultimate freedom, man!”

“Like skinny-dipping,” he tried to equate.

“Yeah, but more than that.  Skinny-dipping in the river, I’ve never done it with boys there.  Not even with you.”  She had to stop the bike and make her point.  “This was in front of everybody and daring them to say anything.”

Alex skidded and turned in front of her.  “But you were in disguise.  Nobody knew you.  There were those 8th Graders, but I don’t think they even noticed.”  There was that one guy, but even though he thought she was gay, at least he thought the boy “Ted” was gay, not a girl.  Alex tried to get them riding, again.  “If there were nude beaches here, you could just be you.  I know they got them in Europe, but I don’t think there’s any here.”

“It’d be nice.  It’s been, like, three years since I went to the river with my sister and her girlfriends,” Tess noted.

“My dad says he’s going to get us a pool for the backyard,” Alex said, trying to look at Tess and navigate at the same time.

“He’s said that before…”

“But I think he feels guilty enough to actually do it, now.  If he does, then we could swim naked right in my yard.”

“Then…” she swerved her bike closer to him, “you could invite Suzie over and see her naked, right?”

“I… suppose… that could happen,” Alex told the sky.  “If she would do it.”

“Well, if she does, I’ll let you,” Tess conceded.  “Especially after this whole thing, so…”

They continued to ride, getting a little anxious to get home.  The whole event had made them both extremely horny.

When they got to Alex’s house, they dropped their bikes in the yard.  They weren’t sure who would be home, and found Alex’s brother in the kitchen getting a bag of Doritos as they entered.  He had a couple of friends over, so he told Alex, “Hey, you and your little girlfriend better stay out of here.  Don’t bother us.  Keep to yourselves and keep it quiet.”  They happily retreated to Alex’s bedroom and closed the door.  Tess popped back out and used the kitchen phone to call home and let her mom know she was back from Night Swim and would be at Alex’s for a while.  Things were cool.  While Tess turned on the radio, releasing Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Alex shoved a wedge under the door to make sure his brother didn’t bust in on them.

No sooner was the door shut again than their t-shirts were off and Tess was working on her shoes.  “I have to get this gizmo off of me!”

“Should have changed in the washroom there,” Alex said, prying off his shoes.  “And wrapped the whole thing in your towel.  The bike ride would have been more comfortable.”

“I was still nervous I’d get found out, after that one guy,” she said, kicking down her loaned gym shorts.  “Help me with this thing.”  Alex played out his towel on the floor for the wet items.  First, he pulled the old green swim suit off of her, then the Speedo, then the supporter with the wet sock stitched in.  That one hit the towel with a splat.  “Naked girl alert!” she teased.

“Don’t I know it…”  Looking at her pussy never got old.  He picked up her towel from where she dropped it on the bed and took to drying off her midsection for her.  The supporter had left crease marks in her waist, like it used to do to him.

“My legs are what needs it,” she said, taking the towel from him, and rubbing her inner thighs, being rougher than he probably would have been, taking care of the itchiness and clamminess caused by the constant dampness of the suits as she rode home.  When she figured she was done, she tossed the towel on the pile and fell back to the bed, her butt on the edge, her legs open, her pussy available.  “I’m still wet, you know.”

“I can guess where.”  He got to his knees and set himself in front of her.

“All those cocks today…  But yours is the only one I want to see, now.”  She started rubbing her pussy as he took the hint and stood up.  He pulled off his shorts and underwear in one swift move.  She took ahold of his half-hard cock.  “It’s actually a little cold!  Gotta warm him up.”  She wrapped her lips around his cock head and sucked him in.  Alex was a little over five inches when hard, and she found she could take the first two, maybe three.

They’d come a ways since their first time together a few weeks ago.  A blow job was no longer a ‘suck my dick!’ insult.  Tess was having fun trying to make it work, and Alex was never going to tell her she was doing it wrong.  First off, he had no frame of reference and, as he’d learn later on, there is no such thing as a bad blow job.  The only funny-negative he’d said that first time was ‘Need more practice,’ but she knew!

Alex could let her suck him for as long she would do it, but, “I want to try again.  I want to see how wet you are.”

Tess pulled off of him with a pop.  “I’ll let you…”

He dropped to his knees again and hesitatingly buried his face in her open pussy.  He’d finally gotten the nerve to try licking her the same day she’d done it to him, but he feared he wasn’t as good as she was getting.  He still tended to focus on her hole, stabbing into it with his tongue like he would his finger, like he might with his cock.  He was better at reading her when he could see her face and hear her, and feel her breathing and her heartbeat when he used his fingers, but he hoped she wouldn’t stop him and tell him ‘You’re doing it wrong!’

“Come back up,” she moaned to him.

He stopped and pulled himself away, though he still stroked her labia.  He wiped his mouth and moved up to kiss her.

“I meant to move up to my clit more, but since you’re here…”  She kissed her boyfriend.  She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down onto her tight and kept kissing him.  She could feel his cock on her pussy; he was pressing, but not rubbing.  She decided to push their boundary.  “Do you want to fuck?”

Alex pulled his head away with a smack from her lips.  “That’s… that’s a big step, don’t you think?”  He swallowed.  “We haven’t…  I mean…  You could…”

“You were willing the other day…”

“And I didn’t do so good, did I?”

“We could just try it.  I really want to feel what it’s like.”

“I don’t know.  Maybe we shouldn’t.”

Tess rolled her eyes in frustration.  “But you’re a boy.  Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to want to fuck me?  And I’m supposed to be all, ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that!’”

Alex felt slapped inside.  “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m sorry,” she immediately told him, knowing what she’d said and how she’d said it.  “I didn’t mean it like that.  I just saw the funny in it and…”  She tried to kiss him but he pulled back.  “Alex.  Alex, I really am sorry.  I’d never make fun of you.  Well, not here, anyway.”

She just didn’t get it, Alex told himself.  He started to release her altogether.

“Alex.  I’m sorry.  I’m really sorry.  I don’t know when to shut up, I guess.”  She sat up to maintain eye contact now that he’d slumped back on his knees, again.  “I think I’m just… after swimming and the locker room… I’m just so horny.”  She looked him dead in the eye.  “I’ve got an itch.”

Alex gave in and relaxed as he still wanted to do stuff.  He just didn’t want her to make fun of him if he did it wrong.  She only had as much experience as he did.  And if they started fucking, that was just so dangerous.  “You want to do the ‘thing’?”

Her eyes lit up.  “Yeah!”

Before he got onto the bed, he shut off the ceiling light and turned on his reading lamp, but he put his shirt over it to dim that down, too.  He adjusted the volume of the radio to blend with whatever noise they made, but not so loud his brother would come pounding on his door.

Alex moved onto the bed and lay down center.  Tess straddled him, holding above him on her hands and knees, and centered herself so her pussy was on top of his rock-hard cock.  She ran a hand through herself, opening up her flower, making sure her labia were wrapped along his shaft.  She slunk down so she was laying on top of him, chest-to-chest.

She kissed him.  He closed his eyes and kissed her back, running his fingers into her short brown hair which had dried kind of shaggy.  They kissed again, and kept kissing.

She whispered in his ear, “This is actually my favorite part.  When you kiss me.  Any time you kiss me.  I love… the closeness.”

“Yeah.”

She started sliding her pussy along his cock.  Forward, first, until the tip of his cock was almost at her entrance, then back, slowly, until his tip poked her clitoral hood.  She pressed and rubbed harder there until her clit was revealed, and still brought a hand down to fix it and make sure it was positioned right.  “That’s it,” she hissed.  Then she began a slow, languid back-and-forth, making sure she caught her clit on his head each time and slid further.  “Oooh, yeah.”

Alex couldn’t hold her tightly as she was moving too much, rising up now, so he slid his hands down to her butt.  He didn’t try to control the speed — that was up to her — but he liked her taking his hands along for the ride.  There was a commercial for the StarBeat Dictaphone for a bunch of clubs that didn’t mean anything to them, yet, and then his song came on: Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.”  His hands began to tap the beat onto her rear as he started singing along quietly as if he were a guitar.

She lowered herself, again, chest-to-chest and made a request, “You have a good voice.  Sing to me.”  He was a little embarrassed for her noticing his singing, but proud at the same time.  There was no way he’d tell her ‘no.’  He sang along with Robin Zander, but quietly, right in her ear, now caressing her back as she caressed his cock with her pussy lips.

“I want you to want me,” he sang.

“I want you,” she breathed.

“I need you to need me,” he sang.

“I need you,” she whispered.

“I’d love you to love me,” he continued.

“I love you,” she told him.

He stopped singing and just looked at her.  That was a bigger step than maybe fucking.  It was darkish in the room, but he could still see her plainly, her eyes looking into his eyes.  Did she know she’d said it, or was she just scamming, saying the words back to him that he’d sang?

She didn’t stop rocking, that continued whether they spoke or not.  He did pick the lyrics back up, singing again softly, and there was another “love” line in there, making them both think about what she’d said, again, and his lack of response. 

When the song got to its bridge, she tried to match the intensity with a more frequent stroke.  On several upstrokes, she’d caught the edge of her hole on his cock head, but had pulled further and slipped back into her rhythm.  On this last one, she didn’t fix it; on her downstroke, she let his cock slip inside her.  She’d captured his cock head and had started to fuck him.

He realized it.  Should he fix it for them, or…?  She’d found different positions during her rocking, but now she pushed herself further upright, not letting him go.  She pushed herself further down onto him.  There was no resistance, just the tightness.  She’d mentioned she had played with a toy, and was quite rough with her sports, and he’d had his fingers deep inside her, so whatever either of them knew of a hymen really didn’t matter.  It wasn’t there.

But something of Alex’s size hadn’t been inside her before.  Nothing was going to stop her, though.  She took a few measures of the song to get used to the stretching, and then lifted a little, and pushed him further in.  She did this twice more, and then…

“You’re inside me,” she squeaked.  “You’re all the way inside me.  I can feel your hair on my clit… your balls on…”   She rose and sunk down again.  “Your whole cock inside my pussy…”

Alex couldn’t speak.  His mouth was open, but he couldn’t say anything.  It was incredible.  Better than when she put it in her mouth.  Damn, it was tight.  She rose and slammed down on him.  It was all the way in.  He ran his hands up her flat chest, swirling about her nipples.  He tried to look in her eyes, but she was nearly vertical on him, and her eyes were closed.

“You’re fucking me,” she moaned, louder than she thought.

He moved his hands around to her back and pulled her down to him.  They were face-to-face again.  “You’re fucking me…” he corrected.  Then, with this angle, he pulled his cock from her and thrust back inside.  That was good!  He did it again.  “Now I’m fucking you…”

Tess wasn’t going to let that stand.  She rocked and met his thrusts.  His rhythm was broken, and they took two thrusts to get it back.  She started trembling and then she got very wet.

“Ohhhh…  Fuck me,” she moaned in his ear.

And that did it.  He was going to shoot.  He could feel it churning in his balls, inside wherever, and it was going to blast out inside her pussy.  “Oh… this is… the best… thing… ever!”  He thrust into her once more, she was shaking, twice more, she was still shaking, and then…

He couldn’t do it.  No.  He had to pull out.  Would he do it in time?  He wrapped his arms tight around her ribs and screamed.  He pulled his cock out just as Tess rocked back into him.  He was out, but he shot his load all over her ass.  Again.

They both rode out their orgasms as the song switched to David Naughton’s “Makin’ It.”  If they were listening, they might have laughed, but they were too inside themselves.  Tess did not roll off of him; he didn’t let go of her.  When they relaxed and could breathe, she found his eyes.  “Why did you stop?  Why did you pull out of me?”

“I…” he began.  They’d done it.  They’d lost their virginities.  Together.  They had fucked.  But he couldn’t actually cum in her.  She had to know why.  “I don’t want to get you pregnant.”

“You won’t get me pregnant,” she said simply.

“Yeah, I can cum,” he said, sure of himself.  “If I cum in you, that’s sperm.  I’ll get you pregnant.”

“I haven’t started my period, yet,” she said.  Didn’t he know?  “I can’t get pregnant until after my period.”

“So…” he was confused.  “What if I came in you and you have your period tomorrow?  Then you’ll be pregnant… because the stuff…”  Wasn’t that right?  “I have to steal some rubbers or something.”

“No.”  She lifted above him, but stayed on him.  “The way things look,” she indicated her flat chest, “I probably won’t start my period until Christmas.”

He tried to wrap his head around that.  They showed them the “girl stuff” in sex ed back in 5th Grade, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to him about menstruation, he just knew what he had to know: sperm in a girl makes a baby.  That was why he was so relieved he didn’t cum in her that last time, too.

“I’m not gonna get pregnant,” she assured him, “so we can fuck now.”

He exhaled, relief and embarrassment both playing on his face.  “Okay.”

“But, next time.”  She rolled off of him, carefully.  “I should get home, now.  It’s like 10:30.”

He helped her climb over him and they both stood up.  “You want the cum shirt?  Sorry…”

“Yeah, you came all over my ass, again…”

They both burst out laughing.

“I mean look at you: big and blonde and strong and cute… and I used to think smart… and you cum all over my ass… twice now!”

They laughed harder as he tried to wipe her clean with his shirt.  He would have used her towel as that was available, but her mom would wind up washing that.  Karin had taught him to do his own laundry.  Tess took the shirt from him and finished the job.

They got dressed to Suzi Quatro’s “Stumblin’ In,” Alex finding a clean shirt, and Tess locating where she’d hidden her original shorts and panties.  He reminded Tess to bring back her blue tank suit that she didn’t wear, too; she rolled it up in her damp towel, which might make it seem like it had been worn.

Alex arranged his room while Tess used the washroom, then all set, they headed back out.  He was determined that, yes, he would walk her home. 

They were heading to the back door when they found his brother and his friends in the kitchen, laughing about a beer they’d put in the freezer having burst and frozen.  Just had to get past them…

As they neared the porch door, his brother teased, “Taking your little girlfriend home?”

Alex replied under his breath, “Shut up…” and then his head flew into the door archway.  His cheek smacked right into the hard wood, and his ear caught on the edge.

“Don’t tell me to shut up, you little asshole.  Get out of here.”

Alex pulled his face off the archway, knowing he had a welt, at least, and a bruise would soon follow, maybe a black eye.  His cheek felt broken, if he could tell anything by it.  But he could see, so his eye was okay.  His ear felt wet, though.  Tess was shocked by the action and was about to tell his brother off, but Alex stopped her, grabbed her arm.  “Don’t,” was all he told her.  It would just be worse if she got involved.

Outside, she offered him her towel for his ear, but he waved it off.  He didn’t want to get blood on her mother’s towel.  He picked up his own shirt at the shoulder and held it pressed to his ear as they went down the back stairs.

Tess tugged at his arm, leading him toward the front; she’d get her bike tomorrow.  They walked the half-block to the cross street, and the two houses off the corner to her place, holding hands tightly the entire way.  They didn’t say anything.

When they got to her porch, she put her hand to his face, caressed his cheek, but afraid to touch the welt.  She looked distressed, sorrowful.  After their fun day of adventure, and everything in his bedroom that night, this was how the day was ending.

He took her hand away and he kissed her, full and long.  He didn’t care who saw.  The neighbors, her mother, her sister.  Anybody.  Everybody.

When they broke, her eyes were still closed.  He told her, “I do love you.” 

He started down the stairs, and she floated through her door.

And that’s how the day ended.

3. Comfort

￼

For Alex and Tess, there was no repeat performance the next day.  After having lost their virginities to each other the night before, they did not get together and fuck each other blue.  They did not attempt to improve on their bad oral sex, they did not offer each other manual stimulation.  They did not kiss, or hold hands, or tell each other ‘I love you.’

Alex’s father returned from the hospital and did not have good news.  “We knew the procedure had limited chances, and the outcome was either going to be very, very good, or very, very bad.  But with no other recourse, other than watching your mother go downhill and get weaker and weaker every day, she and I decided to try it.  I’m afraid the outcome is not very, very good.”  Karl Brand was a stone before his children; he’d done all his crying elsewhere.

Time was so short, Alex, his sister Karin, and his brother Peter were rushed into the car and driven to the hospital.  Any planned hospice for their home was cancelled, their mother was just being made as comfortable as possible in her hospital room.

“This is not how I pictured this…” his mother said, trying to laugh.  “I’m afraid I’m going to be leaving you all a lot sooner than I’d hoped.”  Alex’s father just sat in the chair near her, allowing the kids to get as close to her as they needed to. 

Peter, at eighteen, was angry and wouldn’t speak to his mother.  He wound up leaving the room and punching the vending machine in the hall, breaking the plasti-glass until it looked like a spider web and eventually collapsed in on itself.  His father was called away to help with Peter and the situation.

Karin, still fifteen, was in near hysterics.  She was crying, apologizing for forgetting a card she’d made for her mother.  She’d been rushed out of the house, she’d forgotten the card, and a box of memories she was going to share, full of little toys and photos she’d curated over the last month, hoping she wouldn’t need it, and now that she did, she didn’t have it.

Alex, recently twelve, was just quiet.  When Karin had calmed down and hugged her mother as long and as carefully as she could, she gave up the prime space at her mother’s hand to Alex.

“What happened, honey?”  His mother ran her hand along Alex’s face, where a thick, bruised welt across his cheek and a blood-crusted ear generated her concern.  Alex had sat at the foot of the bed prior, turned the other way, showing the good side of his face in profile, but there was no hiding it, now.

“Oh, nothing,” Alex tried to smile, but failed.  “A jerk got fresh with my girl and I had to show him some manners.”

His mother suspected that Peter had done this damage, and she was right, but she didn’t ask.  Alex had several small scars on various parts of his body attributed to wounds from Peter taking his frustrations with the world out on his little brother.

“I hope you can find forgiveness for whomever you got in this fight with.  Whatever caused it is wrong, but I hope you can live together peacefully from now on.”  She looked sadder now than she had when they first arrived.

“Maybe,” was all Alex could promise about that.

“How’s your leg?” she asked next.

“Doing better.  I got to go swimming, so…”  Alex had recently had an accident in the kitchen (not Peter’s fault) and spilled a pot of hot coffee on his leg, burning his thigh.  His friend Tess had been there to help him, luckily.

“I’m glad Tess was there.  Take care with her.  And with Suzie.  Things are going to change in high school.  Keep your good friends with you, don’t shut yourself off.  Remember, life is better with friends.”

“I have good friends,” Alex agreed.

“I had a dream,” his mother just seemed to remember.  “It felt like the future.  I don’t know how old you were, but you didn’t look too much different.  Bigger, stronger, but still you, still that blonde shaggy hair.  You were in a forest, by a river — or in a river, I don’t remember — and you were looking at someone.  You were happy.  There was sunshine on your hair and you were wearing a green shirt.  I don’t know why I know that, I just see the image now.  It felt like you were in love.  You had a smile that said you were in love.  That’s what I know, what I feel is right.  I don’t know where or when this was, but it didn’t look like here.  There were mountains.”

“I like mountains,” he said.

“I hope it’s true, then.”  His mother smiled and pressed his hand.  “I love you, my baby.”

“I love you, Mama.”

She closed her eyes.  Karin leapt up.  “No.  No, don’t… I’m not done, yet, Mama!  I have more to tell you!”  Her mother opened her eyes, smiled, and shut them again.  She was weak, but she was not dead, the machines said so.  She was either asleep or passed out.  Karin turned to Alex.  “Find Peter.  She wanted to talk to Peter and he ran out.”

Alex nodded and left to look for his brother.  Peter was not to be found, though.

Alex’s father returned and sat with his wife, letting Karin and Alex get a drink in the cafeteria and then sit in the small waiting room outside, hoping Peter would return.  When he did finally return, with a sock wrapped around his hand, he was still angry, but subdued.  They checked on their mother, but Dad said she hadn’t regained consciousness.

“It’s not fair.  I didn’t get my time with her that you guys got,” Peter shot at them in the waiting room.

“You left!” Karin countered.

“I came back!”

“You got three more years with her than I did!”

The sniping continued, but ended.  Alex thought Peter had six more years, and Karin three more years than he did, though he said nothing aloud.  He’d acquired some of Peter’s anger in the interim, in the waiting.  If his mother was going to leave him, maybe she ought to just get on and leave them, then.  Quit this waiting, this maybe, this praying for hope, this hope that she’ll wake up and everything will be all better again.

An hour later, his father returned to them, and it was over.

* * *

When they got home, Peter took his backpack and no one saw him for two days.  Karin and Alex cleaned the house from top to bottom, getting every crack, every window, the grease on the stove.  Alex wasn’t sure why, but Karin needed to do it, and she needed him to help her.

Tess, Suzie, and Joey came by when they found Alex had returned, but he didn’t talk to them, just kind of waved at them from the door and shook his head.  They knew, then.

Tess and Suzie each came by again, but Alex wouldn’t see them.  Karin spoke to them.

At the funeral on Saturday, the entire neighborhood came to the wake and the cemetery.  Alex sat with his cousin when his friends weren’t there, but they did come.  He still wouldn’t speak, but both Tess and Suzie held his hands, throughout.  Even Joey broke from his family to sit with Alex.

Relatives kept asking Alex about the bruises on his face and the scab on his ear so often that Tess went home and got him a pair of her sunglasses, dark aviators, which he wore indoors and out for the duration.  He didn’t want to look like a spy, or look cool, which, in his black suit, any other day he would.  But with them on, people got the idea that he wanted to be left alone.

Peter was angry that his mother was being buried — he didn’t want her alone, in a box, in a place with all these strangers, someplace he’d never want to visit, and Karin argued back that he wasn’t around to help make any decisions or even talk to his father.  Alex stayed out of the argument, just sat behind his sunglasses with Tess and Suzie.

There was a luncheon for those who’d come to the funeral.  Alex didn’t eat.  Joey, Tess, and Suzie did, and tried to get him to, but they knew.  Though Joey had to leave with his family, Tess and Suzie told their parents they were going to stay with Alex until it was over and help Karin clean up, and were allowed to.  They all came home later with Alex’s family.

Back home, Tess kissed Alex and told him she’d see him later.  Suzie gave Alex a kiss — a real kiss — and said she’d check on him tomorrow.

Alex’s father and Karin retreated into their spaces in the house.  Peter took off.  Alex sat in his frontroom staring at a television he hadn’t turned on, still in his black suit.

Tess had changed out of her dress, though still looked nice, not in jeans or “play clothes,” and came back to sit with Alex, trying to get him to open up.  They sat through a Muppet Show, then flipped channels from Battlestar Galactica to The Bad News Bears.  At 8:00pm, it was either The Love Boat or the movie version of Judy Blume’s Forever.  Tess kind of wanted to watch that, but didn’t know how Alex was feeling, if he wanted her here, or if he would say or choose anything at all.  They made it about half-way through the movie when she asked him if he would, at least, get out of his black suit.

Alex turned to her, stood, took her hand, and she walked with him.  He went to his bedroom.  He didn’t turn the light on.  She sat at his desk chair.  He took off his jacket and tie, hanging each nicely in his closet.  He opened his sleeve buttons, then one by one, the buttons down the front of his nice white shirt, took that off, and hung it over the back of his desk chair.  Tess picked that up to fix how it hung, and could smell him on the shirt collar.  He emptied his black suit pants pockets, then removed them and hung them in the closet.  He did not find any new clothes.  He pulled off his white undershirt, then his black socks, and threw them in his hamper.  He removed his briefs and put them in the hamper, too.

He stood in front of her, naked.

He turned and opened the Star Wars covers on his bed and got under them.

Tess stood up and used the telephone in the kitchen, then shut off the television.  She returned to Alex’s bedroom and closed the door.  She removed her clothes, folded them, and set them on the desk chair.  She crawled under the covers with Alex and wrapped her arms around him.

He immediately closed his arms on her, too.  He held her tight, so tightly that he had to remind himself not to hurt her, though she did not protest.  He put his head in her shoulder, breathed out and shuddered, and continuously fought the battle not to cry.  Eventually, his breathing became softer and regular, his hold on her relaxed, and Tess knew he had fallen asleep.  She found a way to be comfortable, and joined him.

Somewhere after eleven o’clock, she had awoken.  She found Alex awake next to her, just stroking her arm, watching her.  “You’re up?  You okay?” she asked.  He squeezed her arm twice, lightly, and nodded.  Something had changed, some little bit, something inside him.  He still wasn’t speaking, but he felt different.

“I’m still here.  I’m not going anywhere,” she assured him.  She didn’t know if that was the right or wrong thing to say, especially with the day’s events, but she wanted him to know.

He kissed her cheek.  She turned to him and kissed him back, full.  Careful, at first, just to assure him.  He continued to kiss her, warmly, softly, so she gave it back.  He stopped and turned her body toward him, holding her point-to-point, and just held her close, his mouth dipping into her shoulder, kissing her there and up her neck.

She ran her hand up and down his back, slowly, gently.  She wished she had breasts; she imagined it would be so much more comfortable like this, and perhaps he’d touch them.  She was so thin, she poked him with her knee or elbow every time they shifted, but she found a good spot, hooking her foot behind his knee and hugging his leg between hers.  She couldn’t help but run her hands down to his butt; he had a cute butt, and squeezing it lightly made her think that’s how her breasts would be, when they came in.

He was getting hard.  That hadn’t been her intention, to make him hard, but he was a boy.  His kisses were getting more intentional on her shoulder, on her neck, up her throat, and then on her lips.  She kissed him back.  It was okay, she was here for him.

He pushed her back off her side and moved his head down to kiss and suck at her nipples.  She liked when he did that.  Again, she wished she had breasts, but she liked when he did that.  He was getting very warm.  She was getting warm.  It was warm under the covers, and it was summer, but she didn’t want to throw them open.  Warm was good.  His hand moved down to her pussy, grazing her bare vulva, then dipping inside.  She didn’t grab for his cock — she knew where that was, hard against her thigh — she’d have to fidget too much to get her hand in there.

He moved on top of her and settled between her legs.  She opened them for him.  She wanted him to do this.  She hadn’t thought they’d get a chance to do it again for some time, with the mood in the house and with Alex closing himself off, but it appeared he wanted to.  That was good, wasn’t it?  In the last couple of hours, and especially the last fifteen minutes, he’d opened up to her more than he had all day.

He put his cock into place, or at least where he thought it was supposed to go.  “A little lower,” she whispered.  He tried, and found the spot, starting a gentle but insistent thrust.  It was hard gaining entrance, and he slipped upward and lost the spot.  Her hand appeared, fixing her flower, showing him her wetness a little deeper, and guided him.  In a moment, he was inside of her again.

The first time, the last time, it had been so thrilling, her on top, making it happen little by little.  It only lasted a short time before Alex had pulled out of her, but it was glorious.  She wanted that feeling again.  She wanted it better.  She had nothing to compare it to, but she knew they were both nervous before, and they didn’t really do it right.  She wasn’t nervous, now.  Just a little worried for Alex, yet.  He’d been hollow all day, and now there finally was his need to be with her.  She not only wanted to help, but she loved how they were doing it.

Alex was gaining momentum, thrusting inside of her.  He fell out of her again, but fixed himself and was back inside, filling her.  It was still so new, this fullness inside of her, but it was Alex inside of her.  It’s who she wanted.

It was weird liking a boy that she played baseball with.  And bikes.  And superheroes.  Skating in the winter.  Star Wars.  And hanging at the mall.  And Atari.  Well, Atari at his house, she still only had the Coleco Telstar.  Sometimes they were kids, sometimes they were like teenagers.  They were very much being like teenagers, now.

He was breathing hard by her ear.  He was trying to be quiet in the house, she could tell.  He was almost whispering to her.  He was almost speaking to her.  She could tell what was coming.  It had only been a short time, but she could tell.  She held his butt with both of her hands and wrapped her legs behind his.  “Inside me.  I want to feel it,” she whispered back to him.

He didn’t want to pull out, either.  He didn’t want to leave her.  His arms were tight around her, his breathing got shallow, his thrusting was hard but erratic.  He was an engine.  He tried to speak, “I’m… I’m…” right next to her ear, but she could tell his teeth were clenched.  His entire body clenched, like it did when she stroked him off, but this time it was all inside her — inside her arms, inside her legs, inside her.  And then he thrust one more time and she felt it.  The warmth inside her.

She wasn’t cumming, but he was, and he kept cumming.  When he held still, she could feel him shoot inside her, and then he thrust again, just a rocking, like he needed to.  Slowly, he stopped, but he still held onto her.  Eventually, she felt him breathing again.  She relaxed under him, moved her hands to his spine and in his hair, but she didn’t let go of him.

When they played together, in the park, on the field, in the streets, he always watched out for her.  She was as tough as he was, sometimes better in the games than he was, but she always knew that if there was trouble — with other kids, or with nosy cops, or a buttinski parent, Alex would protect her.  He made her feel safe.  Now, tonight, she was protecting him.  Comforting him.  She wanted him to feel safe.

Neither one wanted to move.  Actually, she wouldn’t mind if he got off of her, but he wasn’t too heavy, and she didn’t want to do the wrong thing.  If she shoved him over, would he get mad at her?  Were girls supposed to shove the boys off, or wait?

Alex lifted his head, found her eyes.  She could see a smile somewhere in his cheeks.  He didn’t speak yet.  She imagined he wanted to say something like, ‘Hey, we did it!  The whole thing!  That was awesome!’  But he didn’t, or couldn’t.  Not yet.

He kissed her.  They kept kissing.  If people saw them kissing, these two twelve-year-old kids, they’d be all ‘Oh, my!’ she figured.  But they liked to kiss.  And they were pretty good at it, too.  It was the simplest thing to do.  It wasn’t to show anyone they were together.  It was just them being together.

Their laying on each other and kissing had lasted longer than she perceived, or boys were really that weird.  He had never pulled out of her, never fell to her side, and she hadn’t made him.  She had felt that his cock had gotten softer after his orgasm, but it was definitely hard again.  She could feel his blood moving inside his arms.  He was breathing deeper.  He was coming back to life, and when she found his face in the blue light from the window, he had that look in his eye.

His hips started moving.  They were going to fuck again.  No.  She wanted to think of this differently.  They were going to make love again.  Maybe that was too grown up.  Maybe she was fooling herself.  But she loved her boyfriend, and that’s what they were doing, damn it!

She giggled into his mouth.  She always swore too much, her sister said.  She even swore while she was thinking!  And when she thought aloud, she could get in trouble.  He looked at her — was she laughing at him?  She had to let him know.  “I knew you’d come back.  That’s it.  Yeah…”

It was squishier this time, a lot wetter with his cum still inside her.  It felt different, but exciting.  He slipped out of her.  He was starting to go faster and it slipped out.  Back in.  God, he’s hard!  Like a… is this where the word ‘horny’ comes from? she wondered, but not aloud.  He slipped out again.  It was the angle.  It was like he figured he had to be on top, and face-to-face, that was the way it was supposed to be done, and his hard, hard cock was slipping out.

She held his elbows, and it stopped him.  “Hey, let me.  It’s my turn.”  With force, she started the turn-over, and he got the idea, and helped with the transition.  Shortly, he was on his back and she straddled his waist.  She found him beneath her and guided him inside.  She sat back and made sure he was inside.  All the way.  “Oh!”  She didn’t mean to let that out, it just happened.  It felt that good! 

Was it loud?  Was anyone else up?  Karin?  His dad?  Did Peter ever come back?  It was after midnight, according to Alex’s glow-in-the-dark alarm clock, and a long day, so the others should be settled, but you never knew.  But if she thought about it, she hadn’t heard any creaking outside the bedroom door or on the ceiling since they’d woken back up.

The first time they’d fuc— made love, she’d been on top.  But that was how it happened, sliding on top of him, getting herself off, when she’d caught his cock in her opening, and then making it happen, little by little, pushing him inside her.  Now, she realized, she could control the speed and the depth like this, perhaps the angle…. Yes, the angle, too.

Until Alex took control back, grabbed her butt, and started slamming into her from below!  Oh, god, that was good, too!  But he let her take it back.  When she bent over to kiss him, he popped out, again, but he fixed himself quickly.  She smiled as he did — he didn’t want to not be inside of her!  She rose back up, vertical, hyper aware of him inside of her, his hands on her hips or feeling what tits she would have, one day.  She found the bounce, but that was making the bed make too much noise.  Then rocking.  Oh, yes!  That was the way….  She moved like this, he went back, almost out; she went like that, and he was back in, all the way….  When she applied pressure forward… her clit… Oh, yeah!

His hands were all over her as she pumped him.  He moved his knees up, she could tell he wanted control, again.  She’d let him.  She leaned forward, and oh, she let him pound her!  She found a way she could rub her clit on him while he did and…  Oh!  That was it.  She grabbed him around his neck and pulled him tight.  She wanted to scream, but knew where she was.  She found his pillow and sunk her head into it, her chin at his shoulder, and just let it out into the foam and feathers as her knees gave out, her pelvis shook, and the sun radiated from her center.

It got very, very wet down below as Tess came all over Alex’s cock.  Knowing that she was cumming was going to make him cum.  Her juices and trembling made him lose any sense of rhythm he had, that either of them had.  Alex immediately gripped her, arms around her back, as he came inside her again, shooting inside her again.

He called her name.  “Tess!”

She got to collapse on top of him, this time, kissing his face and making him smile, though eventually she straightened out and lay next to him.  But during that time, it wasn’t lost on her that the first thing he’d said in days had been her name.

But something was embarrassing.  All this stuff was leaking out of her.  Wasn’t it just supposed to go somewhere in her body?  Even though she hadn’t started her period and couldn’t get pregnant, yet, she knew cum was supposed to go up into her.  I guess when there’s this much of it, though, it’s got to go somewhere…

She didn’t want to try sneaking out of the room to the washroom to clean up and get caught, just in case.  And luckily, she didn’t need to pee, or at least didn’t feel like she needed to.  There was always the cum shirt.  “Hey,” she whispered, but in her tomboy voice, “find me your cum shirt.”

Alex thought for a second and nodded.  She’d been using whatever shirt he’d been wearing to clean her body up after they’d been fooling around the last few weeks.  Hence, a cum shirt.  He looked around the floor, but remembered his room was clean.  He’d put his undershirt in the hamper.  That would have to do.  He got out of bed and found it.  She put it to good use.

The bed was wet, and he had no towel to put down, and there was still a whole night to sleep through.  He dabbed the spot with his shirt, then went to his closet for his spare pillow case — no cartoon picture, just plain blue — and set that in place.  He climbed back into bed.

They found a comfortable embrace.  He combed her short brown hair away from her face.  He was about to kiss her when she said, “I love you.”

He stopped.  She’d said it before.  He’d said it before.  Did it feel wrong, now, for some reason?  They’d just had sex twice, and he did love her, but he was still feeling off, still feeling shaky inside.  Everything was not right, yet.  Should he be feeling this good?  Wasn’t he supposed to be sad and withdrawn since…?

“Don’t tell me you love me today,” he asked of her.  “Just tell me you’re still my best friend.”

She was a little taken aback, but not offended.  “You are my best friend.”  She kissed him, looking him in the eyes.  “But fuck you, I love you.”

He laughed.  For the first time in days.  And he held her tight.

* * *

They fell back asleep, but neither was used to sleeping with someone else, and each awoke now and again.  With Alex’s hard cock continuously poking Tess in the rear, somewhere around 3:00am, she lifted her leg back over him, tried to see if she could spear him inside her, maybe comfortably rock a little without changing positions, something that would feel good, and that’s when she found that he was also awake.  Their “Round 3” lasted much longer than either of their previous, just that slow, gentle rocking, filling her, never completely coming out, gently massaging her button and feeling “how she was,” holding her, kissing her neck, being close for who knew how long.  She wasn’t sure if he actually came in her before he had fallen asleep again, but she knew she had, if from nothing else than being held like that.

* * *

They were both awake and very aware of the house in the morning.  They hadn’t thought this far through about being discovered or Tess’s escape, but they hadn’t heard anyone else moving in the house, yet, or at least in the kitchen.  But the clock said it was only after 6:30am, and it was a Sunday.  No one should be up for a long while.

Alex was very interested in the naked girl in his bed.

“Doesn’t that thing ever go down?” she asked about his cock.  “I know I saw it soft once…”

“Sorry, this is every morning,” he pleasantly assured her.  “I really need to fu-“

“Make love to me,” she corrected.

“Yeah…”  He moved to get on top of her when she stopped him, again.

“Don’t… don’t be on top of me.  You’ll squish me and I’ll pee all over your bed.  I’m not kidding,” she chided him.

“So, no?”

“Oh, I want to.  Just don’t be on top of me.”

Alex sat on his knees inside her legs, getting as tight in as he could, both of them figuring out how to fold her legs over his, and he was soon inside her, sitting up, holding her hips, finding a rhythm as they had morning sex.

“Take it easy, I’m a little sore,” she advised quietly.

“Am I hurting you?”  He stopped all motion.

“No,” she assured him, “I love your cock, this feels so good, just take it easy.”

He got the idea, loving the sight of watching his cock slide in and out of her.  Slow in, slow out.  Each time he pulled back, the flare on his cock head pulled along her ridges, dragging more of her wetness out with it.  It occurred to him the flare was like a barb on a fish hook — easy to pierce, tough to remove.  This is so cool!  In this position, he could roll his hips, like fucking her from below.  It was like she was dancing…  Her eyes were staring past him, through him.  He could tell from his ‘feel how I am’ lessons that he was getting to her.  He wanted to play with her clit, but she’d warned him not to put any pressure on her abdomen, and he sure didn’t want the consequence. 

He wanted a little more room and lifted her leg, his arm under her knee, and found he could get a little deeper, still.  A little faster, and she started to whimper as she got very wet.  But, yeah, now that he’d gotten a taste for it, he really needed to fuck, and he let the pace get the better of him, slamming into her pussy as he pushed himself over the edge. 

And Tess allowed it, hanging onto Alex, pulling him into her.  She could feel his cock swelling, it felt like his head got bigger, she recognized his breathing pattern already, and she knew he was going to cum in her.  His body started rocking a little more violently and she let go of his rear, moving to his ribs to hold him up and away from her, bracing him above, feeling he was going to come crashing down on her body if she didn’t — and she meant it about peeing if he squished her.  Eyes clenched shut, he flailed above her, unable to collapse down onto her, as he exploded inside her. 

She continued to prop him up with her leg and arms until he could open his eyes, and she helped him settle beside her.

He was out, again, catching the bits of sleep he missed at midnight and three.  Tess moved him into big spoon position to hold her, again, and he was just conscious enough to do so.  The spare pillow case had gathered uncomfortably and needed to be adjusted, but she just removed it altogether.  She pulled up the covers to their waist, and folded her hands about his arms.

She would catch up on sleep, later.  She loved the morning.  She loved this morning.  The window was open, the sheer panels of his blue curtains billowing but not flying, the breeze cool enough to enjoy with the blanket.  The sunshine wasn’t coming in directly due to the closeness of the homes here in Colton, but the light was… peaceful.  There were actual birds making their calls before any noise of the city took over in an hour or so.

She could imagine herself in a TV commercial like this, but with a big four-poster bed and wearing some white, frilly, gauzy, ankle-length nightgown.  She didn’t have that, just this boy’s room with Cubs and Star Wars posters, the one Cheryl Ladd poster his mom used to pretend not to see, some toys and books, a bed, and a desk.  And her boyfriend.  She had Alex.

She’d never spent the night with a boy, not even a group sleepover, and wondered if she would ever repeat it — with Alex or some future boyfriend in her teen years.  She couldn’t think of what boy it could be other than him, but she knew there was a long time ahead of her to think about.  Her own mother and father were talking about moving.  No set plans, yet, but it was for work, she knew.  Strange cities had been mentioned.  If she wound up leaving, she’d have to enjoy her boyfriend while she could.

She looked over her shoulder at him.  His golden hair, his darker eyebrows, the mouth she knew that hid the smile she loved.  The welt across his face.  Fuckin’ brother.  She’d gotten him to smile.  He’d even laughed a bit.  Losing your mother had to be tough — something she hoped she wouldn’t have to go through.  It was going to take a while to bring him back to normal, whatever that might be.

But she’d be there with him.

The door opened.  Karin stuck her head inside, starting a sentence she didn’t finish.  She saw her little brother and his girlfriend naked in his bed.  Tess met her eyes, didn’t panic, just gave a question back with them.  Karin looked away and down, then back to Tess.  She nodded, and closed the door.

Tess hadn’t even noticed it was now after eight o’clock.  She carefully slipped from Alex’s bed and found her clothes.  Her shifting of position made her realize how badly she really did have to pee, so she dressed quickly, but completely, no missing buttons, no untied shoes.  She left the room and headed to the washroom, looking out for Alex’s father or brother.

When she returned, she went into the kitchen, where she found Karin getting prepared to make breakfast.  “Good morning.  Want to help?” Karin asked her.  Tess did what she could to assist and not get in her way. 

They figured the bacon and coffee smells would get the men coming in soon enough, but sat to eat the first items they’d made.  “How is he doing?” Karin asked.

“Better.  He’s speaking again.”

“Good.”  Karin put down some eggs, considered something, and then had some coffee.  “I told him he better not be a jerk and hurt you, but now I think I have to ask you the same thing.  Just without the jerk part.”

“I won’t hurt him,” Tess said.

“I mean, don’t abandon him.  He might not be a lot of fun, for a while.  He’ll need his friends.”

“Don’t worry.  I’m his friend first.”

Karin snickered and put down her mug.  “That’s the same thing he said about you.”

Tess looked a little sheepish, but asked, “Do you have a boyfriend?  To help you?”

Karin weighed her answer.  “Not now.  Just got rid of a bad one.  I’m not ready yet.”  She attempted to push a hair away from her eye, but her pony tail had taken care of those.  “Maybe soon.  Got a whole summer to go.  We’ll see.”  She started buttering some toast.  “How about you?  Are you… ready… for what boyfriends and girlfriends… do?”

They were speaking almost as equals, Tess understood.  “Ready or not.”  Her answer seemed a bit too clever, but she was talking to a girl, a teenager, not a judgmental parent.  “He’s nice to me.  It’s nice.”  She met Karin’s eyes.  “It’s really nice.  And we’re… I’m okay, still, you know what I mean?”  Tess made eyes referring to her body.

Karin nodded.  “Soon, though,” she said.

“I know.”  Tess jellied her own toast.  “But he’s the best.  He’s the best one out of all of them.”

“Yes.  He is.”

Alex’s father made his entrance into the kitchen, dressed for an easy Sunday: still formal in shirtsleeves, but his collar was open.  He put his hand on Karin’s shoulder.  “Thank you,” he said to her, “for everything this week.”  Karin put her hand on her father’s and nodded.

“And good morning to you, Tessie.  When did you get here?” he asked.

“Just a little bit ago,” she answered brightly.  “Stopped by to see if our boy wanted to go for a walk or a ride or something.”  Karin smiled and nodded at her.

The sound of his father’s voice woke Alex with a start.  His father was up!  Where was Tess?  They’d found her in the kitchen?  Dang — he was still naked!  And his door was open!  He threw back the covers, jumped out of bed, knocked over an X-Wing, and put on a half-sleeve baseball t-shirt, some briefs, and a pair of shorts.  He was making too much noise — they knew he was up.  There were more voices.  What was going on?  He figured he’d better get out there and take it — whatever his dad and Karin were going to throw at him — and defend Tess.

Alex came to his bedroom doorway and rounded the corner into the kitchen, barefoot, his golden mop a mess, bedhead on his right side, dark circles under his eyes, wary of what he was walking in to.

At his kitchen table was Karin, his father, Suzie, Joey,… and Tess.

“You’re late.  Your breakfast is getting all cold and eaten,” Suzie kidded him.

He connected eyes with Tess where she sat, open chair next to her, and smiled.

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