In One Person

Elaine was sobbing when she reached to turn off her lamp with the dark-blue shade. When she thrust herself back into me, her sobs were louder; she was grunting as she rubbed against me. Her sobs and grunts were strangely commingled, not unlike the yelps a dog makes when it's dreaming.

"Don't let him get to you, Elaine--he's such an asshole," I whispered in her ear.

"Shhh!" she hushed me. "No actual talking," she said breathlessly, between her half-strangled cries.

"Is that you, Naples?" Kittredge called to her. "Lights out so soon? To bed alone, alas!"

My dress shirt had come untucked from my corduroys; it must have been the incessant rubbing. The shirt was blue--the same color as Kittredge's boxers, I was thinking. Elaine began to moan. "Keep doing it! Do it harder!" she moaned. "Yes! Like that--God, don't stop!" she cried loudly.

I could see her breath in that cold razor of air from the open window; I was grinding against her for what seemed the longest time, before I realized what I was saying. "Like that?" I kept asking her. "Like that?" (No actual talking, as Elaine had requested, but our voices were being broadcast to the quadrangle of dorms--all the way to Tilley and the gym, where the returning team buses were still unloading.)

The flickering light from the movie projector had stopped; the windows of the basketball court were in darkness. The Western was over; the gun smoke from the shoot-out had drifted away--like the Favorite River boys, drifting back to their dormitories, but not Kittredge.

"Cut it out, Naples!" Kittredge called. "Are you there, too, Nymph?" he called to me.

Elaine had begun a prolonged, orgasmic scream. She would say later: "More like childbirth than orgasm, or so I imagine--I'm never having any children. Have you seen the size of babies' heads?" she asked me.

Her caterwauling may have sounded like an orgasm to Kittredge. Elaine and I were still straightening out the bedcovers when we heard the knock on the door from the dormitory hall.

"God, where's my bra?" Elaine asked; she couldn't find it in the bedcovers, but she wouldn't have had time to put it on, anyway. (She had to answer the door.)

"It's him," I warned her.

"Of course it is," she said. She went into the living room of the apartment; she looked at herself in the long mirror, in the foyer, before opening the door.

I found her bra on the bed; it had been lost in the crazy patterns of the rumpled quilt, but I quickly stuffed it into my Jockey briefs. My erection had completely subsided; there was more room for Elaine's little bra in my briefs than there had been for my hard-on.

"I wanted to be sure you were all right," I heard Kittredge saying to Elaine. "I was afraid there was a fire, or something."

"There was a fire, all right, but I'm fine," Elaine told him.

I came out of Elaine's bedroom. She'd not invited Kittredge into the apartment; he stood in the doorway

to the dorm. Some of the Bancroft boys scurried by in the hall, peering into the foyer.

"So you're here, too, Nymph," Kittredge said to me.

I saw that he had a fresh mat burn on one cheek, but the mat burn made him no less cocksure than before.

"I suppose you won your match," I said to him.

"That's right, Nymph," he said, but he kept looking at Elaine. Because her shirt was white, you could see her nipples through the fabric, and the darker rings around her nipples--those unpronounceable areolae--looked like wine stains on her fair skin.

"This doesn't look good, Naples. Where's your bra?" Kittredge asked her.

Elaine smiled at me. "Did you find it?" she asked me.

"I didn't really look all that hard for it," I lied.

"You should think about your reputation, Naples," Kittredge told her. This was a new tack for him; it caught both Elaine and me off-guard.

"There's nothing wrong with my reputation," Elaine said defensively.

"You should think about her reputation, too, Nymph," Kittredge told me. "A girl can't get her reputation back--if you know what I mean."

"I didn't know you were such a prude," Elaine said to him, but I could tell that the reputation word--or everything Kittredge had insinuated about it--truly upset her.

"I'm not a prude, Naples," he said, smiling at her. It was a smile you give a girl when you're alone with her; I could see that she'd allowed him to get to her.