The Outsiders

He released her hands to slide his fingers over her hips to her waist, and from there across the curve of her ribcage. "Jackie, you are so beautiful tonight," he said.

His hands sought the hooks on her bra, then he eased the straps from her shoulders and he brought it forward to expose her nipples to his gaze for the first time, though he had touched them before. The sensation seemed to her much more intense and inspiring than it had any right to be.

She loosened his belt and opened the hook on his trousers. But once they dropped to the floor he cupped her buttocks and he lifted her so that her legs went automatically around him.

It brought that sexually aroused part of him hard -- HARD -- against her own throbbing core, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and brought his mouth back to hers. This time it was her tongue that was the invader, her hips that writhed against his, and with a moan of anguish he released her.

He placed his trousers over her dress on the chair. When he bent to remove his shoes and socks, he felt awkward, and Jackie certainly didn't help by running her hands over his back when he bent over and by kissing him in several places. She removed his shorts herself, putting her hand around what came to it. His desire for her increased when she did, even more. She felt it increase in her hand.

They stood for another moment and kissed, he naked but for glasses and she with only culottes. He picked her up and he carried her to the bed. When he set her down, he leaned forward and brought his mouth to hers again. The hungry pressure of it was too demanding, the hot invasion of his tongue too mind-bending to allow any kind of coherent thought to dominate. She was on fire for him, kissing him back with a raw abandon that had nothing to do with intelligent reasoning. But she did not need to think now, only to feel.

Her whole body was suffused with the pleasure that her mouth was drinking in. The life of the mind, which had been her center, and where they had met and fallen in love, was totally left behind now. Little rivulets of flame sped along her veins, melting her bones and thickening her blood. His tongue seduced hers, assaulted hers, sucked hers into his mouth with a greedy possession, and her arms crept around him now without her really being aware of it.

Her breasts were taut and swollen, aching with desire as was all the rest of her. When Jim's mouth left hers to seek that delicate skin, she sighed with satisfaction. She trembled when his mouth took possession of one engorged peak and suckled eagerly. She had never experienced the surge of emotion that the sight of his head against her dusky breast inspired in her. Her hand cradled his head and her fingers slipped into his fine light hair. His lips eased one ache but they did nothing for the greater one. But that would come...

Jim lay beside her and he caressed her, and she put out one hand to stroke the hard length that would soon possess her, and she it. When he took down the culottes, Jackie motioned to the drugstore bag on the dresser. He left her to fetch it and read the directions on the package inside, then he joined her on the bed again with the contents in one hand.

Her limbs, freed now from any restraint, wound themselves about him, and his groan signaled how close he came to proceeding without the contraceptive, to ravishing her at that instant and letting his unrestrained seed flood out and find her fertile egg as it might.

But he resisted. He took the package from the place on the bed where he had dropped it and his hands moved lower, sliding between her legs to find the slick curls that hid the eager core of her womanhood. The muscles there jerked and constricted under his probing caress, and Jackie moaned, deep in her throat, as he stroked the palpitating source.

When the opening was very ready, he knelt to insert the tube and inject the spermicidal jelly. The jelly felt cool as it entered her and it tingled slightly. The parallels between what they had just done in preparation and what they would do next were clear in the minds of both of them.

He put the syringe and his glasses on the dresser and he lay beside her again. She timidly opened herself to him, and Jim moved over her. As he did, Jackie glanced to the mirror on her bedroom wall and looked at the contrast of the light and dark flesh and she saw a bit of his shaft as it touched her.

She never knew if it was that sight or his touch, but she shivered with desire. His gentle probing began then and intensified until he encountered the inner door. It took all of her will power not to force her hips upward at that moment.

"Please -- now..." Jackie whimpered, placing her hands on his withdrawing hips. He returned, gathering force until she felt a stinging, and then he advanced unhindered.

"OH," she cried, taking short gulping breaths as he began to move inside her. The swelling waves of delight, that previously she had only touched upon, were already overtaking and overwhelming her, and, although she was sure a woman was not supposed to be aroused so quickly, she couldn't help herself. He filled her, and he filled her with more joy than she had ever felt in her life. Then the pleasure grew minute by minute until she felt another liquid injection, this time a hot one, and she melted, calling his name.

That was on Friday night. On Saturday morning they learned how much more pleasant a shower could be with someone there to help you -- though it took longer.

The movie that they had planned to see on Friday night became a Saturday matinee instead. And that night they went on another voyage of discovery, putting more theory into practice. That led to Jackie arching her back with the pulsations of pleasure she felt as he worshipped her core with his lips and tongue. They spent that weekend lost in love and each other.

On Sunday afternoon Jim emerged partly from the pleasant haze to sit at her kitchen table in a rumpled shirt and offer some ideas about their wedding. Jackie just wanted at first to distract him from anything but the present by stroking his hair, or his face, or whatever she could reach -- so he held both her hands in one of his until she capitulated.

They did both want a church wedding. She admitted that the Baptist church she had gone to since she was a child (though not for the last year or so) might not be best. His family and his friends in Texas could probably fly here easier than the people here could go there. Jim would talk to the minister of the Methodist church he was nominally attached to in D.C., though they didn't see each other all that often.

Making wedding plans caused Jackie to bring up half-formed daydreams which she hadn't thought about in years, which both made her want to hold Jim tighter and think about fantasies of less formal but more repeatable events, and that led to postponing the plan-making for a while.

The plan-making about the wedding. As they lay there afterward, the two of them did talk about children, however.

They were together until Monday morning, when Jim left to change before going to work. And he left from her apartment on the next four mornings also...

On the next Saturday, he told her that he needed to do laundry, and told her that she was quite welcome to join him at his place while the machine worked. Jackie decided against it. She had been putting off telling her family about Jim and about planning to marry him, and perhaps while he was gone she could think of what to say and make the call.

It was harder than she thought, and she still had not spoken to her mother when she glanced out the window and saw his car drive up and saw him get out of it. She also saw the car that sped down and hit Jim and threw him up and into the windshield of a car going the other way. The car that hit him kept going.

She ran screaming down the stairs, but he was already dead. The body went back to Texas for the funeral. He had mentioned her to his family for the last six months, had told them that he was thinking of marrying her, and he called home to tell them about her acceptance the Monday after he proposed. His family offered to pay her way to Texas, but at the last minute she could not face the trip. She probably could not have faced the funeral if she had gone.

Jackie stayed in her apartment and wept for the next week. She turned off the telephone. The people at Sanders Associates thought that she had gone to Texas. On the next Saturday afternoon, Maggie Flynn knocked on her door. They sat and talked all day, and she got Jackie ready to accept the world again. That little woman had muscles in her soul.

One can't say whether she recovered even then. But she got on with her life.

For the next six months Jackie went to parties, but she could not bring herself to accept a date. The idea of being alone with a man still bothered her too much.

At the end of the six months, she got a job offer with Williamson Tech in Indianapolis. She was afraid to think of being in a city, a whole part of the country, where she did not know anyone. But on the other hand, Washington had a lot of painful memories for her and moving away from her family might make some of her troubles with them easier to handle. She did worry some about whether there were any blacks in Indiana.

She shouldn't have. There were quite a number. There are about 250,000 of them in Indianapolis, and a lot more in the rest of the state. To her surprise, many of them were farmers. Even more to her surprise was that the born-and-bred city girl got to love the countryside. She spent a lot of summer afternoons on the weekends driving through it, and then walking through the state parks and even climbing rocks.

Jackie also trusted herself with men again. She dated perhaps a dozen of them over the next two years, both black and white. She liked all of them -- well, almost all -- but she did not get serious with anyone. That spark that had burned so brightly in Jim Miller did not seem to have even a pale reflection in any man she met now. She began to despair that she would ever find another like him.

In the second spring that she spent in the midwest, Jackie flew back to Washington when Muriel Thomas died suddenly in the street of a heart attack. Her sister Lucille came in from Philadelphia with her husband and her baby. Donald came from Los Angeles, where he had settled after he left the army. Bob's two children cried and fussed a lot, but that was almost welcome as a distraction from the grief.

After the funeral, Jackie visited with Maggie Flynn, now Maggie Mason. They sat and drank wine, and the wine hit her harder than she expected. She spent the night on their couch instead of the bed that had been prepared for her. Maggie and her husband got her to the airport in the morning without much time to spare.

Only a few months later, Jackie found herself travelling back to Washington one more time, but now for a longer stay. She had gotten a job with an insurance company as a senior programmer, at 20% more money than the job in Indiana paid. This was in the September before her twenty-fifth birthday.

Almost on the day that she moved into her job with Carrolton Life and her new apartment, she met a black man named Neville Wilson. Here she thought she might have found at last someone who could satisfy both her family and her desire for the sort of man she wanted to spend her life with. Ironically, this was when the last of her family became almost irrelevant, as Bob and his wife sold the old house and moved to Richmond.

It was a year later that the letter fell from his coat that Jackie found on the floor in the morning. When she opened it, she found that it was from a woman and talked about the night that woman had spent with Neville two weeks before, the night Neville had called Jackie to tell her he had felt ill. That made Jackie want to slam the door in his face the next time he came to it and never see him again.

But the letter also talked about that woman taking heroin with Neville and sharing a needle with him. That made Jackie want to kill Neville, slowly and painfully.

As it happened, the next time she opened the door to him there was nothing available to use on him but her hands, and he moved fast, so she didn't. The HIV-test had already come back negative.

The breakup of the relationship made her more depressed than Jim's death, because of the self-loathing that it brought out of her. But it did not effect her work; she simply turned herself off.

She was glad to be paired on a complex computer project with David Whitley at Carrolton Life just about then. She knew that he was a quiet man, but that was almost all that she did know about him despite being in the office with him for a year. She didn't really know how he would be to work with. He might be a total male chauvinist pig, but the only way she would ever find out was to spend the next four months working with him to put together the new system.

Four months was what it said on the calendar, though it seemed longer. In a way it was, because they put in a lot of overtime together. Neither of them took any time off during that period, and at least once a week they had dinner together in the office, to keep going on the project. It was maybe as well as far as Jackie was concerned, because she wanted to throw herself into something and forget about Neville and what he had done to her. And work was much less permanent than the river.

Jackie wanted to swear off of men for a while, forever by the way she felt. Jim Miller seemed all the better now, with a longer retrospect, and she felt even less that she would ever find his equal. But David Whitley was interesting to talk to once he started, and they had a lot of time to talk while they were waiting for the computer to print out, and at dinner in the office on some nights. She started thinking about him, whether she wanted to or not.

She kept thinking that he looked like Jim, then catching herself and knowing that he did not. His hair was darker, his eyes were brown, his face a different shape. And he was a few years older. Although Jim, she realized suddenly, would have been that age now. His mind, his personality, were similar. But that was perhaps an inevitable consequence of the jobs they did -- it would attract certain types of people more than others. But he still seemed to her to be closer than most.

Jackie found out over that four months that David was single, and not dating anyone right now. (She saw more of him than any girlfriend would, anyway!) It took a while before Jackie could relax enough to let him know that she was also unattached.

David was as reticent about his life in that direction as he had seemed to be about nearly everything before they spent those nights in the office. But Jackie eventually pieced out that he had parted on good terms with his last girlfriend and that he felt it wouldn't be fair to take up with someone else until this project was finished and his life had settled down again.

That the love lives of both were zero around then made it both easier and more difficult to put in those hours together. Each found the other very attractive, and both found themselves thinking about that a lot whenever they let their attention wander, on those late nights they spent alone in the office. But neither would ever have admitted it to the other.

Neither wanted to make any moves. They worked well together, and both were afraid of making things go blooie while trying to make them go better. This was a big chance for promotion for both of them. An emotional distraction might blow it, and a strong refusal might ruin their working chemistry. Therefore, both of them danced around and never gave the other any indication of interest.

So they kept it all strictly business, and they never really saw each other outside business hours while the project went on. Except for pick-up and delivery of each other sometimes, evenings and Saturdays; they knew where each other's apartments were. He knew bits and pieces about Jackie, from comments she made, and she knew as much about him.

Once they were finished and the program was up and running, well ahead of schedule, they were called into the president's office, fifteen minutes apart. David was given a position in another department on another floor, with not much more money, but with a clear shot at a really good job when another two years had gone by.

Jackie was offered a better position up at the Philadelphia branch. David told her that he had been given his choice of the two. She wondered if that might have been favoritism, or even racism, but she soon decided that it was more likely seniority. The out-of-town job paid better, and she did have a married sister near Philadelphia, her closest relative left.

In that same conversation, while they were sitting in the cafeteria right after the interviews, David asked her about going out for a night on the town with him to celebrate the end of the project and their promotions. He thought to himself that if nothing came of it, well, he already knew that Jackie was pleasant to be around. But now they were both free to see if their acquaintance had the chance to be anything more, if only for an evening.

She said: "No."

Before his face could fall completely, she continued.

"I've never really liked liquor, and from what you have said about yourself, you don't need it either to have a good time. Night clubs have always been too noisy and raucous for my taste, and I suspect that the reason you suggested it is that it's the conventional thing to do."

David nodded silently, a bit sheepishly.

"I don't see any reason that either of us should be conventional, or anything other than just ourselves. What I would really like to do is to get to know what you are like away from work. There are a lot of things we could do, but I think what I would like best is to spend some Saturday with you, talking to you and walking through a big park, maybe a state park, and end with a movie in the evening.

"I like you, and I'd like the chance to get to know you better in a place where I can hear you talk."

He admitted that this was a better idea than he had come up with, actually, and the two of them decided on a Saturday a couple of weeks in the future, the day after their old jobs ended.

David was not completely happy with this, since it meant that any relationship between them would have very little time to develop before their paths diverged, perhaps forever. Jackie felt the same way, but felt it to be necessary for her, when she thought of it over the next few weeks -- when she had time to think.

Jackie spent just about every moment of the next few weeks on packing, or planning, or finding an apartment in Philadelphia. She had both good luck and bad in that direction. The good was that the place she found was large and in a good neighborhood and cheap for what she was getting. The bad was that it would not be ready for her until the Saturday after she had to move.

But her sister Lucille was able to put her up for that week, and Jackie decided that the five of them (two children, now) could stand to be together for five days.

The office gave them a going-away party the day before that Saturday, for all that David was only going to another floor. A creep who had been making moves on Jackie since the day she started working there got drunk and said in a loud voice that the black bitch must have almost caught pneumonia, making love to David every night on the computer room floor while he did all the work. Though making love is not how he put it.

The way that quiet, polite woman tore into him must have made him feel like his desk had gotten up to bite off his leg. She screamed that David was a decent and honorable man, a gentleman at all times, and that he had never put a hand on her or done anything improper. It was true that David's actions were innocent, but neither could have said the same about what they had sometimes thought.