Grovesnor Dale, Connecticut.
The boy unlatched the gate, stopped by the open window and ducked under the Venetian blind to peek into the kitchen. It looked as if there was nobody home, which was a lucky thing because he’d heard stories about Mrs. Lovely; mostly bad and he wouldn’t listen to bad stories. No sir. What other folk said was none of his concern, he reflected as he leaned his bike against the open door.
“Uh, hello?”
He called up the stairs, poked his head around the living room door, then walked into the kitchen. “Anybody home? Please let there be nobody home,” he said quietly to himself. “I’ll drop these groceries off and be gone before she even knows I’ve been here.”
Mrs Lovely was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for him. Seeing her there, he felt surprise more than anything, because despite her frayed housecoat, she was a prim looking woman of about his mom’s age but more attractive; darker, slimmer. The thought struck him: looks-wise, she almost lived up to her name. Smiling, he said, “Hi, Mrs. Lovely. You’re Danny’s mom, aren’t you?”
At the mention of her son’s name, she put down her morning paper and stared at him over the tops of her bifocals. He looked vaguely familiar, wasn’t it the Macready boy? Yes, she was quite sure it was, and her faint recognition was accompanied by the dull ache of an impact: “You’re Cecil?”
“That’s right, Mrs. Lovely. Cecil.”
Red faced, he piled away Mrs. Lovely’s groceries: food cans, coffee beans, eggs, vegetables, a fresh bottle of bourbon. He sensed her antennae quiver when the bottle clanked against the stove and she said in a loud voice, “Pass me that bottle before you break it.” Then, before she could stop herself, she asked, “Do you remember Danny, my son Danny?”
“Uh, sort of.” His Adams apple bobbed up and down. He disappeared quickly inside the sanctuary of her pantry.
She pursed her lips around a thin smile. Sort of. “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?” She said after a long pause.
“Uh, eighteen?”
Eighteen. Danny would have been eighteen in three days time.
“I liked Danny, Mrs. Lovely. He was a good kid.” He said, trying to get the right words out. He wanted to add that Danny hadn’t laughed at him, Danny hadn’t used him for a punching bag like the other kids, Danny had stuck up for him and sometimes Danny had got beat up too, for sticking up for him. But he figured, seeing how misted up she looked, Mrs. Lovely wouldn’t want to hear all that stuff.
“Yes, he was,” she said, “now, don’t let me keep you from your rounds, I got work of my own to be attending to.”
Clutching the bottle of bourbon in one hand, she stretched with the other for a glass in the cupboard over the sink. The frayed housecoat rose up over the backs of her legs. Her heels lifted clear of her slippers, her calves tightened. He looked away, then looked back again. What sort of work did she do? She sat indoors all day long. She didn’t have friends, nobody. She used to be a dancer, people said. Danced in harbor bars before Danny was born, people said, but after Danny had been killed…it was all nothing to do with him, Cecil wanted to say.
“And don’t forget the milk next time.” She said, but with the touch of a smile in her voice.
The boy’s gaze flickered over in her direction. Drinking bourbon at ten in the morning? But it was none of his beeswax.
Two days later, at ten o’clock, he unlatched the gate and called out her name to let her know he was coming. It was promising to be a warm, cloudless day.
“Why did you bring two quarts? I only ordered one.” She ran the water into the kettle.
“To make up for the one I forgot last time.”
She laughed thinly. “I forgot about that. You and me; two retards in the same boat.”
He popped a stick of gum into his mouth. “I’m not a retard. I’m only a bit slow.” He said, and she looked away quickly.
He pushed past, saying nothing, and no sir he weren’t a retard. The pantry door creaked louder than ever as he unloaded the
groceries: food cans, coffee beans, vegetables, and a fresh bottle of bourbon. He looked into the pantry. She could do with some oil on that hinge, and clean out these cobwebs and maybe put down a few mouse traps. Maybe, he thought, I can do that for Mrs. Lovely. He could, yes, because he wasn’t a retard, and she needed him, though she were too polite to say so.
A week later, the weather getting ever warmer, Irene said thank you. She asked how he was getting along, and added that she had found a photo of him and Danny when they were no more than knee high to grasshoppers. “Just look at you Cecil,” she continued, “you haven’t changed much in ten years.”
‘Who would have thought it, calling each other by our first names now,’ Cecil congratulated himself as he packed away Irene’s groceries: food cans, vegetables, and a fresh bottle of bourbon. He thought Irene looked different today. Irene wore the same frayed Housecoat she always wore, but today she’d arranged her hair, which wasn’t tangled and burred like usual, and she looked sober and even less like a mom.
The kettle whistled. Irene handed him a big mug of piping hot coffee. They sat at the kitchen table and looked through the photo album together and he felt suddenly curious about Danny’s mom.
She stared back at him with a demure smile on her lips as if she had detected his hormonal curiosity and found it flattering. Resting her chin on her palm, she returned to the photo album. Occasionally, her brown eyes would meet his as if to ask something, and finally she said, “Cecil?”
“Uh?”
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
“If you don’t mind me sayin’ so Irene; you say less than I do.”
She turned the pages of her album. The boy was right. She’d lost the habit for conversation and she liked it that way. Apart from sex and religion, there was nothing worth talking about, and on those two subjects, she knew little and cared even less. However, she did consider explaining things properly to him, then thought better of it and said instead, “Let’s go in the living room, I’ve got something you might like to listen to.”
In the living room she pulled a record out of its sleeve, placed it on the record player and lifted the needle across.
“Astrud Gilberto,” she pulled the blinds further down and joined him on the sofa. She sat on the edge of it and sipped at her bourbon. Cecil sipped at his coffee. “The music’s from Brazil, it’s a new kind of music called BossaNova.”
Cecil turned the record cover over in his hands as he listened. There was something about the girl on the record sleeve: she was heartbreakingly innocent, yet sexy; poised in a moment of perfect simplicity as she danced on powdery sand beneath a sun oozing warmth onto the surface of a deep blue sea; Making him feel summery, and wishing for the cry of seagulls, beach ball, and a beach towel to lie down for him and Irene.
“Didyah ever go to the beach, Irene?”
“Sometimes, Cecil.”
“They got beaches in Brazil?”
“I just bet they do. Would you like to go there, some day?”
Irene leaned forward to refill her drink. Her arm brushed against his.
“Maybe if I got the bus fare I’d go.”
She laughed. Kindly.
An elegant reshaping of mood in the room, as he realized that they were very close, and he didn’t want to look at her, and he didn’t know what else to say. She’d read his thoughts if he looked at her, she’d hear it in his voice too, all his quick desires and restless confusion.
She shifted position and rearranged the hem of her housecoat all ridden up over her knees. She caught his stare, the proposal, and considered the heresy of the sudden temptation. Had she still any wonderment to offer or to experience, she asked herself. His first love, her last romance. What else was there left to do? Mozart died at thirty-six, Raphael died at thirty-seven, Byron was thirty-nine, but all had completed their missions before dying. So what of her unfulfilled “missions” she thought, inwardly amused at the pretentiousness of such a notion.
She turned her head and smiled at Cecil sipping his coffee. Poor boy. A pity. He was a handsome lad, she thought, and let her head rest lightly against his shoulder. She could feel his heart beating and knew what was going to happen next, and did not try to prevent it when she closed her eyes and felt his lips press against hers.
After the kiss, neither said anything for a while. Irene tidied her hair, tightened the belt around her robe where it had slipped loose. She put her glasses on the coffee table, next to the coffee mugs, the record sleeve, the empty glass, the whiskey bottle.
He felt confused, foolish. What had he been thinking, trying to kiss this woman? He didn’t even like her enough to do the sex act. And she certainly didn’t think much of him, even after six weeks of coming by with groceries and bourbon.
“Cecil?”
Gently, she showed him how to kiss.
“Irene?”
The kiss continued. Her hand came to rest on the brown plane of his bare thigh beneath his denim cut-offs. A touch that was deliberate and teasing, making him taut as her fingers edged upward, as if she was aware of his stiff cock, but was too shy to touch it. Again, her lips pressed lightly against his mouth, teasing it open. He found himself matching her eagerness, and then her hands gripped his hair and pulled him in until the kiss became actually painful. Then, wriggling free, she said without conviction, “Cecil, we…we shouldn’t be doing this. S’not right.”
The belt around her middle loosened and invited his hand inside. In return, her hand reached down between their bodies and touched the bulge made by his cock. His erection stiffened further, painfully, until he though the unbending pressure of his boner would burst open the fly and spring it upward like a jack-in-the-box.
More urgent now, she pulled his shirt free of his shorts, tongued her way across from one nipple to the other, her mouth never breaking contact with his broad chest. Gaining confidence, his big hands roamed inside her house coat, and discovered that beneath the robe she was naked. He found a warm, rounded breast that swelled to his touch. She groaned into his mouth and arched her back, and the other breast softly tumbled into his eager hands.
Suddenly he placed his hand firmly on her belly, then lower, attracted by the heat there and her soft cries as she half-heartedly tried to resist. Irene felt her flesh tingle, her sex moisten at the boy’s feathery touch, oh God, what was happening to her? She should stop this, but a part of her yearned for it: to be held, to be loved, to be able to forget. Even if it were just for a few short but pleasurable moments; just her and Cecil; Danny’s old school friend. And the thought of it, transplanting for the first time in years thoughts of Danny, shamed, aroused and consumed her.
Freed breasts swept across his lips as she daubed her nipples with the wet eagerness of his mouth. She laughed, sighed. She pulled down his zipper and he felt the oily tightness of her sex pushing down onto his impatient cock, felt her shudder where their flesh was becoming slowly enjoined. He closed his eyes. This was it: sex! He was inside Irene, actually doing her, oh this was love, summer, this was rapture. He cried out her name, and July burst upon him.
What a vision he had of her then, a keepsake for his imagination, a picture to return to repeatedly; Irene Lovely naked, standing by the shuttered window with her back to him, craning her head to examine his cum running like warm butter down her very lovely thighs.
She closed the housecoat, and casting him a look that was indecipherable, wiped her hands and thighs with a wad of tissues. He re-zippered his pants, re-tied his sneakers.
“My, that was an interesting experience.” She said tersely when he joined her in the kitchen. She was chopping carrots for a stew. She threw them into a big pot bubbling on the stove. Next, she plunked down some mushrooms and diced them, separating their heads from their stalks with a swift, unforgiving efficiency. He figured it was time for him to leave. Until next time. Maybe tomorrow, she nodded without looking at him. Yes, tomorrow would be fine.
Groceries: food cans, a fresh bottle of bourbon. Cecil let himself in with the key she left under the mat for his use. “Bring the bottle and two glasses and come upstairs.” He heard her say.
“Where, exactly, are you?” he called out, padding along the hallway.
“Where,” she answered good-naturedly, “do you think?”
He opened her bedroom door and found her lying in the middle of a big, inviting bed.
“I thought you’d never get here.” She said with a smile.
What was it about this big-hearted lumbering giant that compelled her, she wondered as she watched him hurriedly strip, to act like a sex mad teenager? It was wrong, she knew. Such an awful responsibility. For a start, the boy was young enough to be her son, no older than Danny would have been if…but nothing lives forever, she believed. Least of all the fragile things: memories, love, life, the soul, God. She had come to believe even eternity could not be taken for granted. She believed in nothing anymore except the moment.
And that moment having arrived; she turned her attentions back to Cecil, who was standing at the end of her bed, naked, his eyes shining like twin moons. Oh my, she thought, he may be slightly lacking up top, but he’s certainly got it all downstairs. She averted her eyes from his huge prick. She slipped her night gown off and heard him draw in his breath as her naked body was fully revealed to his eyes for the first time.
“Irene, you’re beautiful.”
At this she smiled and pulled back the bedcovers and let his broad, hulking body cover her. That was a nice thing to say. It wasn’t true, she knew, but it was going to be delightfully pleasant believing it for the next hour or two. She felt momentary pain as an over large cock forced itself between her pussy lips, then his breath panting into the crook of her neck as he ploughed onward, then, as her hands came to rest on his pumping ass, a wetness as he completed penetration and climaxed.
Over so soon? She turned her head to one side to avoid his slovenly mouth-so soon! Hot tears in her eyes-so soon! The boy was a dead weight now, a burden, an anchor. She waited while his hardness dwindled inside of her body, then went to disengage, but he stopped her. His replenished and rigid cock butted against her wet sex.
“Cecil…So soon!”
Four hours later, he began to groan with pleasure as he stumbled into his umpteenth orgasm. He was lying on his back, pleasantly exhausted, Irene draped across him, wild, gorgeous, scarlet and ruffled, her hair messed up, her flesh malleable. Her hand was rubbing his cock, coaxing it upward for one final attempt. She paused, and resolved to do an act which she’d never performed before. She pressed her lips in a kiss to his cock’s shining crown, and tasted her pussy, her “cunt”, and thrilled at the thought of even knowing that word. She let her lips gently slide downward, sucking him as her lips molded themselves tighter around his painfully hard erection.
Cecil groaned. He steadied her head, holding her in place. Then, unable to restrain himself any longer, he climaxed into her mouth as his cock slowly slid in and out from between her lips.
She sat up, one hand covering her mouth. She swallowed, burped, blushed and dashed to the bathroom, where, over the sound of the blood still singing in his ears, he could hear her running the tap, gurgling.
Summer was now just a few days away according to the weather reports. Inside her house, it was cool, dark. Cecil placed her grocery bag on the kitchen table: A fresh bottle of bourbon.
Taking him by surprise, she sneaked up to him from behind, unzipped his pants and took out his hard penis.
He carried her effortlessly into the living room and placed her on the sofa. He went and cranked up Astrud Gilberto and took his clothes off. His erection slapped against his naked stomach as he walked back over to her wearing nothing but a smile full of dark promises. Slipping hurriedly out of her housecoat, Irene arranged herself on the sofa, and wondered happily what he was going to do with her today.
Twenty minutes later and she was groaning quietly with the surreptitious joy of the wholly new experience of having a man’s tongue shifting backwards and forwards along the furrow of her sex. She cried out again as he began to suck on her most sensitive place with a determined skill well beyond his tender years.
Cecil was in rapture, fascinated. Pre-cum dripped from the head of his cock as Irene bucked her hips forcefully against his mouth, beyond his control, beyond caring. She whimpered, throwing her elbow across her eyes, and while her orgasm still rocked her body, he parted her thighs even wider, and sank his cock into a blissful heat.
He lent forward to kiss her. “Oh, Irene..”
“Cecil.”
“Olha que coisa mais linda, mas cheia de graca.” Astrud Gilberto sang sweetly above the frenetic music of their enthusiastic coupling.
It doesn’t get any better than this. Irene framed the thought as Cecil shuddered to a powerful climax that peaked with her own, second but sweeter orgasm.
Summer had finally arrived for Cecil.
He leaned his bike against the wall and reached under the mat for the key. It wasn’t there. He searched under the plant pots on the window sill. He knocked at the door and called through the mail slot. Inside, he saw, was filled with stillness. Maybe she’s gone visiting, he reasoned, but knew that weren’t right. She never went out, she didn’t have friends, and he was the only one entrusted to deliver her bourbon, why would she go out? He punched his elbow into a pane of glass and climbed through the broken window. His shoe filled with blood where he gashed open his ankle, but he didn’t feel it.
“Irene?”
He went into the living room. The Astrud Gilberto record was on the record player, a bottle of bourbon; nearly empty. A glass on the floor.
He called up the stairs, no reply, and then he was bounding up the stairs three at a time, running first to the bathroom, leaving a bloody footprint there. The medicine cabinet door was swinging open.
Oh sweet Jesus!
Nuh-no, no!
He ran along the hallway to her bedroom door, saw the note pinned on the door, tore it off, nuh- no, oh please!
It was quiet where she lay, blanketed with darkness and at peace, summer just behind the curtains, but not yet in the room where she lay in her discreet but dignified exit. Her face did not move when he placed his lips on her cheek. She did not wake when he shook her shoulders and demanded that she give an answer. He felt the stiffness in his throat, the tears welling up in his eyes. Irene, what’s wrong with you?
He took his clothes off, folded them, got into bed. He held Irene close. Protecting.
It was summer. Astrud Gilberto sang. He delivered to Mrs. Lovely her groceries. She drank. She sat indoors all day. You shouldn’t have to lie here all on your own, he told her.
Cecil remembered it all. Everyone said he was backward, slow, retarded. A beautiful boy, but soft as noodles. He sat cross-legged on the pavement outside her house, the letter she’d written to him damp with the sweat from his hands. In the distance he heard the clamor of sirens as everyone was waking up, moving closer, closer to him and Mrs. Lovely.
He reached into his pocket and the very kind policeman took the letter Irene had written. Stories. He asked if the policeman might return her letter, after everything had been taken care of.
It was the first true day of summer. And the day was promising to be cold, cloudy, with rain. A small crowd gathered outside Mrs. Lovely’s garden gate, the ambulance men came and went, the skies opened up and it rained. It was summer. Maybe, he thought as he sat on the curb, once I’ve taken care of Irene, I’ll get the next bus to Brazil.
Yes, he decided, he would do just that. First though, he would say his final goodbyes to Irene Lovely. He reached for the bottle he’d retrieved from the living room, and poured himself a bourbon.
He finished it, and then poured himself another.
“Fist Love, Last Romance” © 2002 by G.E. Russell. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.