Tuesday, February 9, 1998
The next morning, Marcus and Jenny switched places. She expected Tommy to feel jealous, but her desires weren’t very strong, and she wasn’t disappointed to discover that he was happy for her.
She sent a thought to him. Aren’t you even a little upset?
I couldn’t hide it if I was, Tommy sent in reply. Jenny, you’ve never had a chance to know your own people, and I’m not going to deny you the chance to get to know whoever you like. You’ve lived too long with the humans, and you’re equating a companion with a husband. I’m not your husband, so you don’t need to feel guilt if you’re attracted to Kevin. I’ll just step back and let you get to know him better.
But what if I decided to leave you? Jenny asked.
Then, even if he was already outside working with Henry to mow the back grass, Jenny felt Tommy lay down beside her in bed. His fingers rested on her stomach, and her chest swelled two sizes.
Knock that off, he scolded. You don’t have to make your chest bigger to please me, so relax and stop trying to make yourself uncomfortable.
He thought nothing at her afterward. His presence dissipated, and she felt stupid for asking her question in the first place.
She couldn’t leave him. It wasn’t a matter of love, or of physical attraction. Their souls were bound, and there was no way to separate herself from a connection so deep.
No matter where Tommy was, he was with her, and she stayed with him.
She got out of bed and pulled on a simple blue sundress and a pair of deck shoes. Then she went through the house in search of Kevin.
Jasmine was the first she found, working in the living room with a rag to dust the hardwood furniture. She found Matilda in the den, sitting in the recliner while she knitted a sweater that blended yarn from balls of three different colors. Aqua, green and blue alternated in neat horizontal lines, and the garment looked appealingly soft, even from across the room.
Jenny ventured closer, and Matilda smiled at her thoughts. The old woman raised her hand and slipped one of her ear phones off.
A tinny blues guitar squealed notes while BB King declared, “The thrill is gone, baby!”
Matilda said, “It will be even nicer when I finish the bottom and move to the sleeves.”
Jenny asked, “Is it a gift for someone?”
“No, I have Tommy take these into town to sell on consignment when I build up a big enough stack. I don’t make much, but I still try to help out.”
Jenny nodded, not sure of what to say. She had a hunch that if she volunteered to work, Matilda would chide her that guests didn’t do work.
Matilda said, “Kevin’s in his workshop, in the attic.”
Jenny smiled, already backing toward the door. “Thanks.”
She waved to Jasmine in the hallway, mystified when the girl huffed and looked away.
Returning to the stairs, Jenny froze once she realized that she didn’t know how to get into the attic. Tommy supplied the answer, guiding her to her goal.
Jenny ascended the stairs, and she went to the far end of the corridor. The door at the end led to a narrow, steep set of four steps. There was a wider platform, angling left into another set of steps that led to a black door. A detailed white skull had been painted on the door, and shaded with tones of gray and black.
It might have looked menacing if not for the cartoon balloon caption above the bonehead: Like, rar, dude.
She opened the door, and her breath caught in her chest.
The horse wasn’t real. There was no way it could be and stand so perfectly still. But it looked real, down to the “fur” picking up highlights from the stringers of white Christmas lights strung back and forth across the ceiling.
There were so many lights on the ceiling that the attic was brightly lit, and everywhere Jenny looked, there were unusual items to catch her attention.
Beside the horse was what looked like an old fashioned news ticker, but the machine had been restored to a factory finish. There was even a fresh roll of ticker tape in the machine, as if it could be plugged into the old wire service and begin working again. Jenny looked at the wire, smiling when she recognized the plug was a parallel port. The ticker could be hooked up to a computer to act as a specialty printer.
On the other side of the horse was an animatronic fortune telling booth, the magenta lacquer paint gleaming almost as brightly as the brass metal parts that held the case together. The gypsy looked fake, but the wig on the puppet was neatly arranged, like it had been brushed and styled recently.
While the skin of the puppet appeared waxy and painted, the eyes were filled with an exquisite level of detail, and the iris patterns were so lifelike that Jenny leaned in to admire it.
“Give me a quarter, I’ll tell you your fortune!”
Jenny yelped, clapping a hand over her mouth as the puppet stirred to life. The light sensor mounted in the front panel alerted the arcade diversion that a mark was near enough to sucker.
When she moved away, the sensor reacted again. “Don’t be shy! Give Stella your money!”
Laughing at herself, Jenny took another step back and thumped into Kevin. She spun, raising both of her hands defensively before she recognized that he was standing behind her.
She laughed and dropped her hands. “Your psychic hotline just took two years off my life.”
“Stella is just about ready to go home.” Kevin walked up to the machine and leaned over to unlock the coin bank. He took out the only quarter from the box, and with the metal coin collector taken out, Jenny saw a row of silicon circuit boards.
She asked, “This isn’t an original arcade machine?”
“No, the case and the puppet are original, and I made the upgrades myself. I design this stuff for nostalgia buffs. This one is a special request for a personal collector in Jersey, but he’s paying more for this then most people pay for their cars, 40 K.”
Jenny whistled and glanced up at the wooden puppet’s face. “What else is she missing?”
“I still have to finish painting her face, and her voice catalog is supposed to be completely random when she reads fortunes. Only…” Kevin leaned over to drop the quarter into the coin chute, and the psychic made a shrill, but obviously fake scream of dismay.
“A curse upon this house!” the puppet shouted, her mechanical lower lip rolling up and down as she spoke. “All who stay will die!”
Jenny shook her head. “That’s dreadful!”
Kevin nodded. “Yeah, and what’s blowing my marbles is, that’s not one of her stock phrases. Every word is in her hard drive, and the scream is part of her repertoire. But that phrase isn’t in the list of options.” He paused to snort before he made a face. “Pretty creepy, huh?”
Jenny stared at the puppet psychic with a nervous pout. “No kidding.”
The contrast between Laura and Kevin became even more stark while Kevin took Jenny on a tour through his workshop. Farther back in the attic, near his worktable, the items on display were all in some state of being incomplete.
Kevin explained that he worked on his creations a few hours at a time, alternating between his projects, his studies, and his trips out on the Internet to look for junk to trade through the NNTP newsgroups, or through his contact in IRC chat rooms.
The back wall of the attic was all bookshelves, and most of the titles were instruction manuals or college textbooks. Jenny shook her head, amazed by the size of his collection. “You don’t know all of this, do you?”
Kevin laughed and stuffed his hands in the hip pockets of his baggy jeans. “No, I don’t even know a quarter of it yet.” He glanced down at the floor before he said, “I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to go to college, since I’m the main caretaker here. So I thought maybe I could just study on my own, and see if something appeals to me.”
Jenny smiled softly. “Marcus was like that in college. He didn’t know what he wanted to study, so he never claimed a major. He just took whatever appealed to him.”
“So what do you want to do?” Kevin asked. “You didn’t seem so keen on going into espionage.”
“Maybe I just want to try and find something less risky first.”
“So you’re going scamming with Tommy.” Kevin kept a straight face as he nodded. “Yes, that’s much less risky. Good call.”
Jenny reached out to slap his arm. It was a light slap, and she did it without thinking, because she felt so comfortable with him.
Her eyes widened as soon as her hand connected, and she drew back her hand fast. “I’m sorry,” she said, stepping back. “That was wrong.”
“No, it was called for, since I was teasing you.”
They both turned at the sound of the attic door creaking open, and then Diana called, “Breakfast is ready!”
Kevin sighed, his shoulders slumping into a defeated posture. “Might as well get it over with.”
Jenny thought he meant that breakfast was going to be as awkward as dinner had been, and she was dreading another round of debates, most of which had the power to make her lose her appetite.
But Kevin’s issue with breakfast was that it was Diana’s turn to cook. Breakfast consisted of runny scrambled eggs, bacon that was somehow both half burnt and half raw, and coffee so weak that it was warm water stained more by the milk Jenny splashed in than by coffee grounds. The toast was limp, and burnt. Jenny didn’t understand how such a thing could even be possible, but Diana had a “gift,” apparently.
She tried to keep a straight face while she ate, but each time she risked a glance up, she found someone watching her. Slowly, it began to dawn on her that the others weren’t just sneaking glances. Everyone was staring at her, waiting for a verdict.
She swallowed a mixed mouthful of snotty eggs and bland toast that sweet butter couldn’t help. Faking confusion badly, she asked, “What?”
Matilda’s mouth was stretched in a thin smile. “How is breakfast, dear?”
Jenny’s gaze flicked toward Diana. “It’s—” she floundered for an adjective that was both safe and neutral. Adequate was neutral, but not safe. Filling? Maybe, and it did skip the matter of what the food tasted like.
She said, “filling,” and Matilda cackled, almost coughing out a bite of toast.
She covered her mouth with her hand, and her gleaming grey eyes sought out Diana’s gaze, who looked like she was sucking a lemon. “Well, that’s something you never heard, Di. It certainly is filling. Sits on my stomach right up until dinner.”
Jenny felt terrible, and trying to think of what to do, she noticed a bowl of white liquid with lumps in it. She took her fork and speared up one of the doughy blobs floating in the thin white gravy. She bit down, and the bready taste was almost familiar. The flour was a bit too dry, but after swallowing, Jenny decided it just needed salt and pepper.
She took another blob from the bowl, depositing it on her last slice of toast as she said, “These dumplings are really good, though.”
Diana went beet red, and everyone else exploded into guffawing laughter.
Jenny had no clue what was going on until she gleaned the truth from Tommy. The “dumplings” were lumps in Diana’s cream gravy.
***
Despite risking complaints from Matilda, Jenny volunteered to do the dishes. Matilda got in a snit about guests doing housework, but Jenny insisted, “Really, it’s the least I can do, for breakfast.”
Which was a euphemism for “the least I can do, for humiliating Diana.”
The fake sentence should have been completed with something like, “for breakfast so good.” But there was nothing Jenny could use that wouldn’t make the family break into laughter.
Then the brief fight with Jenny seemed to wear out Matilda, who grabbed her forehead and announced, “I think it’s time for a nap. Henry?”
He helped her out of the room, and with the kitchen being cared for, Tommy and Diana both left to work small-scale scams in the nearby cities. They would both work alone, to help pull in spending money for their next trip to Texas.
Then, after he had put Matilda to bed, Henry left too. The only other person left unaccounted for in the house was Jasmine, who had vanished right after breakfast was over.
Jenny gathered the dishes, wondering what upset Jasmine so much that she became hostile. But Jasmine seemed to exist with a permanent chip on her shoulder. So maybe Jenny had already done something unintentionally to slap it off.
Kevin helped Jenny move the dishes into one sink, and while she washed dishes, he rinsed them in the second sink, dried them, and put them away. He stood closer than he needed to, and he kept finding excuses to reach around her to deposit an item into the dish water, which let him hold her for a second at a time.
They didn’t talk, and they didn’t feel a need to. Jenny liked being around Kevin, and she felt so comfortable with him that she even liked being quiet with him.
When they finished the dishes, he wandered outside to begin feeding the animals, and a similar comedy routine to the night before played out before the cat and dog settled down to eat.
The squirrel would not be coaxed out with the zipper, which was a disappointment to her and Kevin both.
Jenny looked down when Kevin played with his zipper, but she looked back toward the tree line when she saw the bulge pushing out the front of his baggy jeans.
Kevin didn’t say anything either, but when she looked back, he was smirking and blushing.
Kevin returned to his workshop to work on retrofitting an old jukebox to play CDs instead of vinyl. Jenny followed him, and she alternated between watching him work and wandering around the shop to play with his more complete efforts. She found a pinball machine, and she lost track of time while she played with it.
Kevin surprised her near lunch. He stepped up behind her and rested his hands over hers, forcing her to press down both of the buttons just as the last ball was headed for the flippers.
His goal was to play a prank, but the joke ended up being on him when Jenny yelped and jumped in his arms. The back of her head thumped his nose and swelled his upper lip, and he grunted, swaying back while his hand flew to his nose.
“D’oh!” he groaned. “Dhanks a lod!”
Jenny wanted apologize, but she couldn’t. She put her hand over her mouth, trying to cover her smile. “Oh stop it, you sissy. You did it yourself.”
Kevin snapped his fingers. “Damn, you’re learning how things work around here already.”
Kevin made lunch, but Jasmine didn’t come down to join them. She huffed and told Jenny that she wasn’t in the mood to eat.
Trying to help, Jenny asked what was wrong, and she was stunned when Jasmine’s icy response was, “None of your fucking business.”
After lunch, Kevin tried to return to work, but instead, he wandered back to the pinball game to play with Jenny.
At one point, they started playing together. They stood side by side, and he controlled the left flipper while she took the right. They didn’t talk to agree to the arrangement. He just stepped over to take the button, and she let him.
Jenny began to hum the music of the game, and Kevin made noises to imitate the electronic sound effects each time the ball struck a bumper or a sensor.
Playing together, their focus became so intense that they didn’t lose anything. The game went into multi-ball mode, and they were effectively juggling all six of the balls in the machine. After they racked up the first million points, they both started to get really excited, and they were focused on seeing just how far they could go together.
Which was how they missed the lights in the attic rising to a higher brilliance with all of the excess energy flooding off of them. Jenny and Kevin both were able to absorb the energy from the spell in equal amounts, and they worked together to control the game.
Three of the balls were under Jenny’s control, and three were under Kevin’s. The energy they needed to move objects was huge, and yet they did so effortlessly. This left them with so much energy that they were bleeding it out to the lights, and into the wiring of the house.
They reached a point when they’d locked all six balls, completing the “quest” of the multi-ball mode. The score had rolled off of the screen, so they had no idea how far they’d gone.
“Yay!” Jenny squealed and spun to hug Kevin. Raising up on her tiptoes, she pecked a kiss on his cheek and said, “We could rule the world together!”
Kevin laughed with her. “I thought you said you wanted a low-risk career?”
“Oh!” Tittering, she reached up to “slap” his chest. It was more of a soft pat, and once her hand landed, she didn’t drop it back down.
Kevin’s smile softened, and he leaned down to kiss Jenny. It was nothing at all like Tommy’s kiss, who was bold and decisive from the start. Kevin pecked at her lips timidly, and he suddenly became clumsy as he tried to close his arms around her.
Jenny put her finger over his lips as he tried to dip for another kiss.
She whispered, “Let’s go to my room, okay?”
He nodded, and she led him by the hand out of his workshop, down the stairs, and up the hallway to the guest room.
She shut the door, and they walked to the bed, sitting down together. Kevin fidgeted with the bottom button of his flannel shirt. “I don’t know how,” he confessed.
Jenny beamed a reassuring smile as she nodded. “I remembered that. It’s okay, though. I don’t know much more than you do. Until Tommy, Marcus was the one with all the experience.”
“Maybe we should switch?” Kevin asked.
“What?” Jenny shook her head, her face filling with confusion. “I don’t understand. You don’t want me?”
Kevin’s mouth fell open, but he couldn’t say anything. He resorted to nodding until he could dislodge his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I do, but…” He sighed, raising both of his hands to ruffle the sides of his hair in frustration. “Dang, why can’t I be smooth, like Tommy?”
Jenny grabbed his wrists and put his hands down in his lap. “You don’t need to be smooth like him. You don’t have to be like him at all.” She brought her hand up to pat his cheek. “You just be you. It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?”
She leaned over to kiss him, licking his lips. He took the cue to meet her halfway, passing his tongue over hers. He warmed to kissing fast, and he turned on the bed, his arms again roaming around her in an attempt to draw her closer.
Jenny resisted him and unbuttoned his shirt. She stood up to let him slip off her sundress, leaving her in only her underwear.
Kevin’s eyes wandered over her body, and his excitement was so tangible that it carried a scent.
She kept him at a distance while she undressed him, and then she pushed him back by his shoulders until he took the hint and lay back.
Straddling his hips, she sank down on his cock, her mouth falling open in a silent gasp for air. Kevin’s mouth fell open in a similar way, but his breath rushed out in a loud, shaking pant.
He tried to close his hands over her hips to pull her down fast, and she slipped her fingers around his wrists, pulling his hands over her breasts.
Everything that had felt so right before dissipated as they fumbled to adjust to each other. Overeager for release, he wanted to go fast. Despite her assurances that he could be himself, she wanted him to go slower, like Tommy had.
He bucked his hips, trying to thrust, and she kept her hands on his stomach, denying him more than an inch of play.
Kevin finally relaxed, his hands dropping to the sheets to clutch them while he let Jenny decide the pace.
She rode him slowly, and then her body finally warmed to him. Her chest started to ache, and the heat in her stomach changed into a throbbing tension.
But Kevin wouldn’t last, and she could tell by the way that he was groaning and clenching his eyes.
He sat up to stop her before he lost control, and then their roles reversed as she tried to move and he held her in place by clasping her waist.
He pecked kisses over her breasts and nipples, and then he moved his arms, guiding her to ride against him slowly.
His eagerness overtook his convictions all too soon, but she let him have control then. His first climax was brief and intense, and she had to urge him not to squeeze her so tight.
But he did not soften, and once he recovered himself, he rolled Jenny over on her back. He tried to keep as much of his body in contact with hers as possible, and the mild friction between their bodies soon changed to a slick slide as they both began to perspire.
The ache started to build in Jenny’s chest first, and it evoked the first soft moans from her. He grunted each breath, and the hot rush of air sent shivers along the side of her neck.
The chill shock sank into her back, gaining more strength as it shot down between her legs. It became a tense knot, though not quite an ache yet.
His next thrust sent the shiver back up her spine, and the cycle repeated with every breath, every thrust.
He spasmed and collapsed over her, panting heavily. Every muscle in his body was spent, and his lungs were burning. He could barely find air to whisper, “Did you?”
Jenny was panting, and she was shaking. But she hadn’t been able to get close enough to a climax.
He took her silence as a no, and he tried weakly to move again.
She closed her arms around his shoulders to stop him, and she whispered, “You did fine. Just rest now.”
“But you didn’t—”
She put her finger over his lips and smiled. “We’ll try again tonight, after dinner.”
... I write dark fiction in a variety of genres. My blog contains my rants and rambles, and some short fiction that can only be found here.
I can be pretty fucking offensive, so viewer discretion is advised.
Poor Kevin is feeling down, he doesn’t know that it takes some time to build up stamina. Not to mention how Jenny would like to feel.
He has an intersting hobby of fixing some old stuff to work again. I worry about the fortune teller though, it could really be telling the truth about what will happen to them all.
Yeah, but in Kevin’s defense, it was his first time. He just need time and practice. ^_^
The fortune teller worries me too. I know something bad is coming, but I don’t know when. =^S