THE WHOLE BUSINESS WITH JACKIE

I had just had a fight with Arlene, my on-and-off girlfriend of a couple of years, except that I didn’t know there was a fight until I knocked on her door to take her to the party that night.

Sometime between the time I left home that afternoon, which was a while before I headed to her place, she had gotten a call from Bill Blackstone, who asked her what she was doing that night.

Bill had been trying to make moves on her for a while and I don’t know if he even knew she was dating anyone, since he kind of lived in a world of his own. But she told him about the party that night, I think without mentioning that I had told her about it. He knew some of the people who would be there, though not the hosts, and he wanted to go, so he was coming by to pick her up.

From the sound of her voice, Arlene had been drinking. Whether before or after Bill’s call, I don’t know.

This was not the first time Arlene had a sudden mind-shift, or been drinking, if they were not effect and cause. I turned around, killed some time elsewhere, and went to the party.

I found that Arlene and Bill had gotten there before me. Going without a date was no big deal; Steve and Sue Miller liked to invite unattached singles to their parties in an effort at matchmaking.

Jackie Romains, a thin black woman with big glasses, big eyes, smallish breasts, and curly hair, as well as a roguish smile, commented on the fact that Arlene was conspicuously with me tonight.

I answered as briefly as I could, but Jackie got me off to the side in a quiet spot – not easy at that party – and gradually got details out of me.

She said to me after what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes, “It sounds like you are not going to have much to do with Arlene for a while.”

“That seems fair to say,” I replied. “And after tonight I may just forget about her entirely/”

Jackie reached out her light brown hand to mine and said, “I can’t honestly sat that I am sorry to hear that. I know you well enough, and what I have heard about you confirms it, that you are not the sort to skip ;lightly from one woman to another.”

I felt a little uncomfortable at that, but I could not deny even a certain stubbornness about things like that, and nodded.

“And I have been wanting,” Jackie continued, “to sleep with you for a while now. I want you to come home with me so I can find out if you are as good in bed as I think.”

Now this was about as surprising a thing as I had ever heard. I admitted to Jackie Romains that I had never really thought of her that way, that I liked the way she looked, and the way she smiled, and the way she talked, and (I suddenly realized just before I said it) the way that she thought about things, but getting into her pants was not a thing that had ever occurred to me particularly.

On the other hand, now that it had been suggested, my mind immediately went to speculations and imaginings to how it would feel to slide slowly into her brown body and how her face would look as I brought her to orgasm.