The Key

It was late summer-early autumn. School was back in swing. The days were warm, the nights cool, the moons sharp. 

For a fifteen year old boy waking up to the wider world it felt that life was tilted on edge, hanging on a precipice. There were so many directions to take, so many paths, not the least of which was to just let go, and fall into the chasm.

She was older, and she did the work. She would have had to.

I had noticed her before, had caught her glances in the hallways, and on the bus, but girls were a newly discovered attraction, and a mysterious one. I suspected what those glances meant, but did not yet know what to do with them.

She was new in the neighborhood. She showed up at the courts one day, where we were hanging out, playing ball, “smoking and joking,” as boys will do. She was alone, and unworried by it. She wore short, cut-off jeans below a frilly top that left her mid-riff bare, like her feet. They were unmistakably “after school” clothes... play clothes, if you will. 

She hung out from a distance, watching as we “showed-out,” pretending not to notice her there. We drained bucket after bucket, but she was a sport untried, and the confidence was not yet built in us to walk over, or to speak.

She was still there when we broke it up, with everyone heading off in their differing directions. Like a lioness on the edge of the herd she angled towards the least wary and the most vulnerable, sensing an easy kill.

She drew alongside me. We walked a while, and we talked a while, until she was ready to stop walking, and stop talking.

When she stopped we were alone. It was a spot with no houses, no cars... a spot for creating secrets. I knew what was coming, just as the antelope knows what is coming. I could see it in her eyes. I could see it in the wetness of her mouth, and in how her straight, perfect teeth dug into her lower lip as she smiled at me like at candy. I could feel it in the weakness of my knees, and in the weight of my groin, and in the pounding... pounding... pounding of trepidatious excitement pulsing through me.

Why me, I wondered? Why had she chosen me? Of all the boys in the halls, and all of the boys on the bus, and all of the basketball boys, what had singled me out? 

And then those thoughts no longer mattered as she stepped closer. I could smell her now, fresh and clean, like flowers and soap. Her eyes were wide, hypnotic, dizzying. She was so close I could feel her bare toes atop my tennis shoe. Her breath mixed with mine as our bodies pressed together. I noticed things I couldn’t have before, a light spatter of freckles on her nose, the colorless, wispy hairs on her cheeks, that her eyes were green and yellow and speckled through with black, like a cat’s.

She held to the front of my shirt, pulling me in, and in I went... all of the way. She pulled me a thousand miles-a-minute into a whirling pool of physical sensations, emotional insecurities, and hormonal urges. Everything mixed, and swirled downward, pulling me into the vortex. I fell into a soft, warm wetness that caressed, and cooed, and lightly suckled until I understood her lusts and discovered a few of my own that had been swimming in the deeper depths of me, conserving energy, waiting to thrust whale-like towards the surface in a desperate grasp at heaven.

My hands found the bare skin round her waist. They explored it, and then drifted upward. They lingered there, and squeezed, ever so gently. She moaned softly, and suckled harder, and time was forgotten, and place.

The world became safer, life more balanced, purpose revealed as the loving touch of another smoothed the wrinkles.

I stopped wondering why. Why no longer mattered. 

I was unlocked, the man released, and I understood then that woman was the key.