It had been fun and he’d enjoyed it, but then things had changed.

Then had come the sex.

He’d enjoyed that, too. He’d never known anything like it, and he knew it was something his other friends weren’t getting to do, and it was not only the physical pleasure it afforded, but the exclusivity of the act and the air of the forbidden which surrounded it that so heightened the experience, that made him feel the way he did.

But then…

Then it had gone too far.

Donna had been younger than him but far more knowledgeable, and as things progressed, she had attempted to entice him into perversity. The sex she’d suggested had been unnatural, the acts she wanted him to perform with her things he had never even imagined. It had frightened him and he had pulled away, but he could not remember what happened after that. His memory was hazy. Had she moved? Had they simply stopped being friends?

He couldn’t recall.

But he had an erection even now, just thinking about it, and for the first time since he’d been a child, he allowed himself to remember what he and Donna had done.

He put down the bottle and the shot glass and walked out of the kitchen, down the hall to the bathroom.

He thought not only of what they’d done, but of what she’d wanted to do, of the perverted acts she’d wanted him to engage in, and he recalled the way the girl in the empty house had looked with the window behind her and the meeting of her thighs visible through the thin material of her dirty shift.

He imagined what she looked like without the shift.

Breathing heavily, he pulled down his pants, knelt before the toilet bowl.

He began to masturbate.

NINE

Stormy

Roberta was waiting for him when he got home.

With a lawyer.

The two of them sat on the chairs opposite the coffee table, and Stormy had no choice but to set himself down on the couch. The chairs were higher than the couch, so the two of them looked down on him while he looked up at them. He had to smile. An old movie trick. A visual metaphor. Place the good guys at a slightly higher angle so that there would be a subliminal sense of power and authority on their part, so that they were perceived to have the upper hand and the moral high ground.

It was probably the lawyer’s idea.

This was entirely unexpected, completely out of the blue, but he pretended as though it was something he’d been anticipating, and he placed his briefcase on the shag next to the couch and smiled up at Roberta. “Did we have to bring the lawyers in at this stage?”

She frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Him.” He nodded toward the lawyer, though he was suddenly unsure of himself.