Message-ID: <20691eli$9903210437@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Archived-At: From: "az il" Subject: {ASSM} My Reward Ch27 (MC, no sex, young love, rom, baseball) Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-ID: <19990320221102.14638.qmail@hotmail.com> CHAPTER 27: SECOND CHILDHOOD -- THE BALL GAME The other thing of interest that happened that winter was that I took a trip into my own past. My fascination with Cassie's young body, and watching the fun Beth had been having by playing around with her high school crush, made me want to revisit my own childhood and see what I had missed when I had been too shy to even try to kiss a girl. So I took a trip back to eighth grade, when I had fallen in love with Karen Waner. It was a slow Tuesday in March, and I had just come out of a meeting (couldn't avoid them all) with Michelle to plan the new offices - we were moving to a new building where, because we had grown so large, we would be the primary tenants. The biggest problem the agency faced then, it seemed, was finding enough desks for all the new employees. Paying them was no problem - potential clients were standing in line for our services despite our quite outrageous fee structure. Which wasn't surprising, since our creative won all the prizes at the multitude of award shows and our clients had huge sales increases almost immediately whenever a new campaign was rolled out. The partners were all doing quite well - Michelle had just bought a new house out in Paradise Valley, and everybody had upgraded their cars at least to Infinitis and Lexi, if not to Porsches. Chris was bugging me to buy a new house -- she was contemplating Camelback Mountain -- but I was resisting. I had won a temporary reprieve by having a basement dug (basements are rare in Phoenix), which added another 2500 square feet for a new family room and a play area with a pool table, foosball, air hockey, etc. She had received a Lexus as part of the bribe - and now Sarah was pushing for one. On that I put my foot down. So all was going well - prosperity reigned and happiness (for the most part) abounded. Chris actually deigned to let me slip my dick in her once every few weeks, though she wouldn't go so far as to move while doing so. Anyway, on this particular Tuesday, having just come out of a meeting to plan the new offices, and having just received an outstanding blowjob from my new assistant, Wendy (Sharon had gone back to being a full-time wife and mother), I was not contemplating the few dark spots in my life - my concentration was fully focussed on how well most things were going. One might almost say I was a bit smug at the moment. Which led me to think that it was a bit of a shame that my whole life hadn't been so nice. Not that I had been disadvantaged. I had grown up in a middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood in north Phoenix. My parents were nice people who had given us kids everything we needed and much of what we wanted. But it was an ordinary childhood. What, I wondered, if it had been like the rather extraordinary life I was leading now? Only one way to find out, I decided. I told Reward to turn back the clock to mid-April of my eighth grade year. Ike was nearing the end of his term and all, most of us felt, was pretty much right with the world. The only problem, as far as fourteen-year-old Tommy Mallory was concerned, was that his dick was sore from jacking off while contemplating the many perfections of Karen Waner. Well, that wasn't the only problem. In addition, he was small and skinny and falling behind most of the other boys in athletic skills -- athletic skills, in that social set, referring almost exclusively to baseball. Tommy was a moderately good baseball player (about as good at baseball as Thomas Mallory would one day be at soccer) who was just not keeping pace physically as the other boys grew and developed bigger muscles and better coordination. This development would come, of course, though Tommy didn't realize that. In any case, from his point of view, development that came late was of no solace at all. In Little League baseball, then as now, the kids who develop earliest are made into pitchers, where their relative speed overwhelms the smaller kids. Tommy, never a particularly good hitter, had sunk to the level that his teammates expected little when he got to bat, and a few made derisive comments occasionally. The few hits he got were bloopers to right - since he almost invariably swung behind the pitch. Only because of his fielding ability did he continue to play regularly as a shortstop for the Indians, a team in the St. Thomas Aquinas Little League. So that was the situation I faced as I got up that April Friday morning to get ready to go to school. In order to determine how sweet adolescence could have been, I simply needed to get into Karen Waner's pants and straighten out the baseball situation. I damn near called the whole thing off when my mother poked her head in to wake me at seven-thirty. Both my parents had died a few years previous, and seeing my mother as a younger woman, alive and vital, was painful. When I arrived in the kitchen where my father was preparing to leave for work, I was again ready to quit this game - but I decided to carry on a little further, perhaps avoiding my parents as much as possible. I think my parents were a little surprised that I had gotten out of bed on the first call and had arrived promptly in the kitchen without fighting with my sisters. I realized I would have to be careful about not showing too much maturity for a fourteen-year-old. My father had a few questions about school and my baseball team. Talking to him was painful, though, so I kept my answers short and concentrated on the sports page. He apparently felt such behavior was in line with what was to be expected of me, and let it pass. I ate as quickly as possible and headed off to school. The classroom was pretty much as I remembered it, long rows of desks with narrow aisles. Those were the days when a class of 55 pupils, such as this one, was not unusual in Catholic schools. Green chalkboards on two walls. A corkboard with something about April showers bringing May flowers pinned to it. Surveying the room brought more poignant thoughts. Two aisles over sat Dan Leppert, a teammate on the Indians, though not a particularly close friend. He would join ROTC in college and die at twenty-three as a platoon leader in Vietnam. Mary Callahan, a pretty though mousy brunette who sat next to him, would go through three marriages and live, mostly drunk, in a trailer park in Glendale. Larry Ciambrocco, a friendly, chubby kid sitting in front of Mary, would become a grossly fat insurance agent. And in front of him sat Linda Fox, teacher's pet because she planned on becoming a nun. She would briefly achieve her ambition, be assigned to missionary work in Guatemala, become radicalized, and eventually bear arms for a Marxist guerilla movement and two babies for its leader. He would dump her, accusing her of treason, to take on a younger, fresher comrade. Linda, when last heard of, was running a women's center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and living in a lesbian commune with three other former nuns. But my attention was focussed mostly on the desk immediately in front of mine, because there sat, or would soon be sitting, the object of my fascination, Karen Waner. I hadn't seen Karen since high school, but as she came down our row to her desk, hugging her books to her chest, smiling at friends as she passed, I realized that I had had excellent taste even at fourteen. Karen was something of a pixie. She was rather short (though only a little shorter than me -- I was about 5-2, she was probably 5-0), and slender, though with enough of a figure that it showed through the loose-fitting blue jumper the girls wore as a uniform. Her face was round, with sparkling, slightly devilish, gray eyes set wide with a small nose, slightly uptilted at the end, between. Her hair was light brown, with bangs cut just above her eyebrows, and curls that spun outward at her neck. To me, in those days, she was the most beautiful thing on earth, and even today I see her as darned good-looking -- though cute would probably be a more appropriate word than beautiful. More than her looks though, it was her personality that appealed to me. Really. Though perfectly well-behaved in that almost-prim manner required of Catholic school girls in those days (I knew for a fact that she got an "A" in Conduct every quarter), she was fun to be around. She would laugh (or at least giggle) at boys' puerile jokes, rather than go running to the nun, and sometimes she might even make her own puerile jokes. She was also a good athlete (though not a jock -- that was definitely frowned on in those days), who played on the girls' softball team and could discuss baseball intelligently with the boys. I had had Reward analyze her feelings toward me. He reported back that she had a bit of a crush on me, was aware through the grapevine (and, no doubt, by my lost-calf expression whenever around her) that I had a big crush on her, and was wondering when I was going to do something about it. Her idea of doing something about it was perhaps a try at a kiss, though holding hands would do for the moment. I had a bit more in mind. She smiled shyly at me as she reached her desk and began to put her books in the compartment below the seat, modestly arranging her skirt as she squatted in the aisle. I smiled back and asked her if she was coming to the game that night, noting that we were playing the Pirates. She said she didn't know. "I really hope you do," I said, almost brazenly forward by my standards -- I could see she was a little surprised. "It's going to be a really good game." She smiled again, and I nearly melted. "Yeah, I'll probably be there," she said, turning to face the front as the bell rang and we stood to say our morning prayers. I floated through the morning on the strength of that smile. At lunch, I had Reward arrange for an empty seat between Karen (sitting at the edge of a group of girls) and a group of boys. A boy sitting amongst the girls was simply not done - but it was acceptable to take a seat on the border. As I sat, Karen looked up in surprise - this was another rather astonishingly bold move for Tommy Mallory. She also looked pleased and smiled shyly. Two girls across from her giggled. We conversed through the short lunch period. Standard practice was to wolf down the swill as quickly as possible in order to maximize the time available for playing. We also operated on the principle that the less time the food remained in our mouths, the less opportunity it had to assault our taste buds. The conversation, abbreviated as it was, covered a variety of topics vital to our lives, including baseball (of course), a couple mutual enemies, and the difficulty of reading the nun's tiny, spidery handwriting on the board from our desks in the back of the room. By the time we were finished eating I was even more certain that Karen Waner was the love of my life (year fourteen model). During the lunch, I had had Reward search her mind and take out all of the fears and repressions about sex (this was pre-pill, and pregnancy was the number one fear). When he reported back, he also informed me that I was scoring big with her. An extra dash or two of hormones and an occasional tickle on her clitoris, he suggested, should guarantee success this evening. I approved the plan, and saw Karen's face flush -- possibly from the hormones, possibly from the ideas the itch in her crotch had suggested to her. As we arose to carry our plates to the kitchen, she mentioned that her parents were going shopping that evening and taking her brother with them. "If I come to the game, I'll have to walk home alone," she told me. "It's always so scary going into an empty house," she concluded, "I want to come to the game, but only if you'll promise to walk home with me afterwards." I had little difficulty agreeing to those terms, and we parted, Karen joining a couple other girls near the door (they immediately began questioning her), and me following a few steps behind. To actually leave the lunchroom together with Karen would have been impossible -- it would have meant passing together directly in front of the hard-eyed nun in charge of watching the section of the cafeteria by the door. Reliable sources reported that prior to entering the convent, she had spent several years as a guard at the state prison. I would never consider walking past her with a girl, even with Reward's help. The afternoon passed quickly -- I got one beautiful, even proud, smile from Karen when I correctly answered a difficult question in history and even added a few additional comments. Actually, I had had to bite my tongue, since I had been about to question our textbook's interpretation of the causes of the Great Depression -- which put way too much emphasis on the stock market, and barely mentioned in passing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. I realized at the last moment, however, that such discussion might seem out of place in an eighth grade classroom. As we were walking out of schoolyard at the end of the day, I noticed Karen walking rather slowly (very slowly, in fact) in front of me. I hurried to catch up, as of course she had intended. She smiled as she saw me beside her, and we picked up our conversation where we had left off at lunch. When we were around the corner from the school, where the nuns could no longer see us, Karen casually brushed her hand against mine. I took the hint and her hand. This first contact flustered her for a few seconds, but then she managed to ask something about homework. I answered as best I could with my whole consciousness concentrated on my hand. I briefly considered moving the seduction schedule up a bit, like to immediately, but decided not to. A bit of a make-out session might be in order, though. Just before we reached Karen's house (mine was another street over), I had Reward add a high oleander hedge in front of a neighbor's house. I led a wondering but not protesting Karen behind the hedge and put my arms around her waist. Again she was surprised, but pleased, by this newly-aggressive Tommy Mallory. She smiled at me, then closed her eyes expectantly as I leaned forward and placed the first "real" kiss of my life on her waiting lips. Although it wasn't much of a kiss, little more than a momentary brushing of the lips, it thrilled both of us. Karen sighed and pressed herself against me, folding herself into my embrace and resting her head on my shoulder. We stood stationary for what seemed a long time, then Karen took her head off my shoulder and kissed me. This kiss was as light as the first, because nice girls like Karen could never take the initiative. But I took it as a signal that she wanted more, so I returned the kiss with slightly more pressure and gently lowered us both to the cool shady grass. Hidden from the street by the oleanders and from the house by a group of bushes Reward had thoughtfully added (he showed real potential as a landscape architect), Karen could feel comfortable that we would not be seen and did not resist as we dropped to the ground. We sat side-by-side, my arm around her waist, Karen leaning against me as I leaned against a tree. She turned to me and again offered her lips. As we kissed, she turned her body slightly, to make it easy for my right hand to slide to her side and then slowly upward to the small swell of her breast. As my hand touched the side of her breast the feeling was electric, even with multiple layers of clothing intervening. Karen leaned forward, pressing her lips more tightly to mine, and twisting her breast more into my hand. Emboldened, I cupped the breast fully and caressed it lightly, drawing a shudder of pleasure from Karen. My hand on her breast pushing her backward gently, I lowered her to the cool grass without breaking our kiss. As she lay back, her hair spread around her like a halo, I kissed her more strongly and tentatively pressed my tongue between her lips. Slowly her lips opened to accept me in, as my hand began squeezing her tender young breast. Her hand snaked up to the back of my head and pulled me down more tightly. Finally she broke away from the kiss, twisting her head, saying, "Oh Tommy, we can't," followed almost immediately by, "Ohhh, it feels so good." Then she kissed me again as my hand slipped up under her blouse. Catholic schoolgirls of that time wore full slips under their blouses, so I was still two layers of clothing from heaven. I knew there was no way I was going to get to her bare breast now -- it would require almost totally undressing her, which would be pushing her way too far, too fast. But the simple act of getting beneath her blouse excited her (and me). Her breathing quickened and she tightened her grip on my head. Again she said, "Tommy, we can't," but made no move to stop me as my hand again cupped her breast and squeezed. As we continued to kiss, my hand slowly moved downward, then trailed down her long skirt to her knee. As it touched her flesh just above her knee, Karen sucked in her breath sharply, but didn't object and returned to kissing me as I began to move slowly up her thigh. My hand tenderly caressed her thigh, first on the outside as it traveled up to her hip, then, after reaching the nylon of her panties and gently touching her soft buttcheeks, slowly moving across to the inside of the thigh. She moaned softly as my hand neared her crotch, and then whispered "Oh yes," as my finger touched her slit through the soft (and wet) nylon. I stroked up and down her slit for a while as she purred with pleasure. At that moment, though, a door slammed and a woman walked out of the house. She didn't see us, of course, but Karen cowered back behind the tree until she got in her car and drove away. Karen giggled nervously as the housewife drove off, then kissed me quickly, straightened her skirt, tucked her blouse back in, and gathered up her books. I tried to prolong the kiss, but she said, "Not now, Tommy. Not here." This time she meant it, I knew, but I also knew that "not now" meant later, and "not here" meant somewhere. The moment was gone, of course, which was just as well, since I had been about to lose control, as had Karen. Tonight would be better, and Karen would have several hours to think about what she held felt in the past few minutes. As we stood up, I took her hand and as we walked on toward her house I quickly leaned over and kissed her cheek. "I love you, Karen," I said softly. She smiled at me. "I love you, Tommy." * * * The stands were full of excited fans. Well, they were full, anyway. Though admittedly that wasn't saying much -- they only held about fifty people. This was enough for the parents, and the kids preferred to stand around in groups and kibbitz. The game promised to be a good one -- the Indians and Pirates were the two best teams in the league. Which again wasn't saying much, since there were only four teams. We had played once before, the Pirates winning as their star pitcher pretty well shut us down. The Pirates though had lost to another team on a night when the star was missing, so we were tied for the league lead. The consensus among knowledgeable observers was that the Pirates would be back in the lead after this game and coast on to the league championship. The game started off according to form, with the Pirates, whose only weakness was a lack of power, scraping out a run in each of the first two innings off a collection of scratch singles, a couple walks, and some sloppy Indian fielding. Meanwhile, the Indians were set down 1-2-3 in the first, as the Pirate stud totally overpowered us. In the bottom of the second, he began to show his periodic wildness (which was part of what made him so scary) by walking one batter and hitting another. Then he settled down and struck out the next two. Everyone in the park felt that he had worked his way out of the jam, since he was facing the Indians' number eight batter, their weak-hitting shortstop, Tommy Mallory. I could feel if not hear the groans of my teammates, seeing a potential rally slip away as I entered the batter's box. I stepped to the plate, looking over toward the cluster of girls on the first base side where Karen stood with her friends. She had momentarily stopped gossiping with them to concentrate her attention on the game. Or, more to the point, on me. I took the first two pitches. The first a ball, high and wide, the second a called strike that I felt was clearly low. Another call like that, I figured, and I'd have Reward take over the umpiring. The third one I told Reward to groove for me and to slow it down to my speed (very slow). It floated over the plate like a fat, lazy balloon and I teed off on it, driving it into the left center alley. With two out, the runners were of course running as soon as I hit it and both scored easily to tie the game. I made second standing up, shocking the Indians, I suspect, as much as the Pirates -- it was my first extra-base hit of the season, raising my average to .243. I looked over at Karen and saw something that pride, approaching hero-worship, in her eyes. It was a look I wanted to see more of. The next batter, the only person in the starting line-up worse than me, struck out feebly on three pitches, stranding me on second. My teammates greeted me warmly after the inning, though, one of them carrying my glove out to me. In the third, perhaps buoyed by being unexpectedly back into a game that appeared to be slipping away, we put the Pirates down in order. Unfortunately, they did the same to us, and in the fourth, we took a pounding, as the Pirates batted around and scored four runs. Our bench was pretty dispirited as we sat down. We were down 6-2 and nobody had ever scored more than three runs against this pitcher. But again I came to the plate with two out and two on, the result of a walk and a throwing error on an easy grounder that should have ended the inning. My teammates, I sensed, were ambivalent. I'd come through the last time, the optimists in them argued, but their more realistic sides countered that it had probably been a fluke. Again I looked over at Karen as I stepped into the box. She was staring at me with total concentration, completely ignoring her friends, who chattered behind her. The first pitch was low, well below my knees, but called a strike -- the ump was beginning to annoy me. But I put him out of my mind as I told Reward to give me another fat one. He did, I swung, and this time, aided by Reward, the ball carried over the fence in left for a three-run homer. There was a palpable pause before the cheering began. Understandable, because nobody believed what they had seen. Our field had been constructed for the high school team, with fences much too deep for eighth graders. Home runs were an extreme rarity in our league -- maybe half a dozen per season. A home run by a skinny little shortstop? Impossible. Once the cheering started though, it was loud and long. People actually stood up and yelled -- even many of the Pirates' parents. As I circled the bases, loving every second of it, I looked over at Karen, who was literally jumping up and down and shaking her friends to get their attention on what her boyfriend had done. When I touched the plate I was mobbed by my teammates, now believers all. The Pirates again seemed to be stunned by my hit, and went down meekly in the fifth. We did the same, getting one runner on another walk, but stranding him. So we went into the final inning trailing 6-5. The Indians were feeling hopeful, though certainly not confident. Everybody knew, though, that we didn't dare fall any farther behind. The inning started well, as the first Pirate batter popped up softly to third. Then we got into trouble. Dan Leppert, who was pitching, got a couple bad calls on close pitches (the ump was asking for a Reward-induced case of hemorrhoids, I felt), walked the second batter, then got rattled and started throwing wildly. The next two batters also walked, filling the bases, before our coach brought in our relief pitcher. It was a bad spot -- a walk scored a run, a fly probably scored a run, even a grounder might score a run. As for a hit -- we didn't even want to think about it. And the Pirates' best hitter was coming up. I glanced at the crowd. Everybody, even the girls along the first-base line, was watching closely. Karen was rapt, her hands partially covering her eyes, afraid to watch, afraid not to. The batter was a lefty, so I moved a few steps closer to second. Then I gave Reward his instructions. The batter swung at the first pitch and sent a screaming low liner back over the mound, almost taking the pitcher's foot off. It was a sure hit, everyone knew -- two runs, maybe three. Except that I had moved over toward second base and had taken off with the swing. The ball struck the ground just behind the pitcher, then bounded waist high over second. I neared second at the same time, stretched my glove out to field it, stepped on second, and threw a strike to first to double the batter, who was barely halfway down the line. Double plays were a rarity in little league, and this one involved a big reversal of fortune, from several runs for the Pirates to no runs, Indians at bat. The audience took a moment to realize what had happened before standing to applaud. Karen was in an ecstasy of hero-worship. The Indians were excited, too. Still behind 6-5, but they were believers -- they knew that if they could just get their new star to the plate, all would be well. I was fourth in the order that inning though, and the first two struck out and popped out, as the Pirate's big pitcher put everything he had into his pitches. As I stood in the on-deck circle and watched our third batter get behind 0-2, I told Reward to fix things quickly. He did it the easy way, though not easy on the batter. The next pitch was a fastball that hit him in the butt. As he trotted down to first, trying to rub his sore ass without being too obvious about it, all eyes were on the confrontation of the Pirate's star pitcher and the Indian's star hitter. This is the way games are supposed to end, each team's main man facing each other with the game riding on every pitch. I decided to milk the drama a bit, working the count to 3-2 (one of the strikes was definitely low), then fouling off two pitches, one a screaming liner down third that made a booming sound as it struck the wooden fence just off the foul line. That was enough drama, I figured, and told Reward to make the next pitch the big one. It floated in, I creamed it, and it sailed high over straightaway center, clearing the fence by a good twenty feet. The Pirates just stared dumbfounded at the fence as I trotted the bases to the music of delirious cheering. None of the other eight Indians had gotten a hit, but the Pirates had lost on the seven RBIs of . . . of . . . Tommy Mallory, forgodsake. I probably should have felt sorry for them, but I was enjoying too much the moment that I'd never had before -- the moment of being the sports hero, the moment of being cheered by a huge (by our standards) crowd. The whole team met me at the plate and carried me to the bench, shouting with joy. And Karen and her friends had hurried over to stand behind the bench, Karen looking at me with . . . it was now beyond hero-worship, it approached adoration. The next ten or fifteen minutes in my memory are a confused melange of cheers, congratulations, backslapping, and general exuberance. The important thing was that, after I had gotten my after-game coke from the concession stand, Karen was waiting near the gate to be walked home -- to the house with no parents. Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com -- +----------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `--------------+ | | | | Archive site +----------------------+--------------------+ Newsgroup FAQ | ----