Jim Monday slipped his shoes off, massaged his tired and sore feet, then stretched out on the bed, fully clothed, too tired to undress. He closed his eyes, was about to fall into a dark sleep, when he heard the tapping on the connecting door.
He sighed, got up and opened it. Roma was on the other side.
“ I’m sorry, I thought I could sleep alone,” she said, “but I can’t, not with you in the next room.”
“ Are you okay?” he asked.
“ I don’t know if this is right, but I know it’s what I need,” she said, as her fingers moved to unbutton her blouse, allowing him to see a skimpy bra and ample cleavage. He couldn’t help comparing her with Julia. They were alike, but different. Julia was demure and modest. Roma was brazen and direct. Julia, even after years of marriage, would never undress in front of him. Roma was doing it.
She balled her hands into the blouse, pulled it from the tight fitting Levi’s, took it off, dropped it on the floor. She looked him in the eyes, stretched her arms behind her back and undid the clasp while shrugging her shoulders forward. The bra fell at her feet.
“ I need you, Jimmy. Even if we’re both sorry tomorrow. Even if it’s only for tonight.”
“ My God, what’s going on here?” Donna thought. “She’s getting naked right in front of us.” Then she moaned in his head. “What’s this, what’s happening, I’ve never felt like this. My lord, this is what it feels like for a man. This is what it feels like when it gets hard. Oh, oh, oh!”
The aerobics and the daily jogging paid off in small ways. Roma’s breasts were more firm, more pointed, more youthful than Julia’s and her waist, a touch thinner than her twin’s.
She half smiled, turned and drew the curtains, plunging the room into a surreal twilight. The curtains were designed to keep out the light, but enough came through to bask the room in late evening bronze, reminding Jim of a red sunset on a Southeast Asian beach.
He was swimming in a sea of confusion. She had his wife’s fluid movements, the same strong back, the same dishwater blond hair. For an instant he was at ease with the familiarity, but the ease left when she turned to face him again. A shiver rippled through him as she worked the top button on her Levi’s. She popped the button open, then she stopped and smiled at him.
“ You should have visited me in Florida.” She crossed her arms in front of her breasts.
“ You know I don’t fly,” he said. He never admitted to being afraid. He preferred to say he didn’t fly.
“ I didn’t back then. I might not have gone had I known,” she said.
“ Editorial writer for the Miami Herald, the job was too good to refuse. You had to go. I couldn’t hold you back.”
“ So you married my sister instead.”
“ You were gone. I thought I’d never see you again. I fell in love with Julia.”
“ Did you fall out of love with me?”
“ No.”
“ Why didn’t you tell me about your fear of flying?”
“ I was ashamed. I broke down on the flight back from Vietnam, went crazy, shouting, screaming. It took several men to restrain me. Until that moment I thought I came through it okay, but only hours from home I fell apart.” He paused to catch his breath. “For years it was all I could think about, going home. Then when it finally happened, I snapped.”
“ And you don’t know why?” She relaxed her arms, once again baring her breasts, but her voice was so full of concern that Jim knew she wasn’t conscious of her nudity. Her only care was for him.
“ No. I was okay after we touched down, but I was so humiliated, that I swore I’d never get on another plane. I don’t know if it would happen again, but I can’t afford to take the chance.”
“ I’m sorry. Did you ever consider professional help?”
“ No, but I should have,” he said. “I know that now.” He looked back into her gaze. Admitting he was wrong about something, anything, was hard for him. He sought her approval and understanding. “I’ve missed out on a lot. There’s a whole world out there and it’s been denied me, because I’ve been afraid to get on an airplane. I should have gotten help right away, instead I tried to bury the problem, always finding excuses to stay put.”
“ And now?” She met his eyes.
“ And now, if we get out of this in one piece, I’m going straight to the nearest head doctor and get my head shrunk.” He laughed and she laughed with him.
“ I was terrified when you shot those two men.” She moved to the armchair opposite the bed and sat down. “It was the most afraid I’ve ever been, but I knew if you didn’t do it, they would kill us. I wanted to run away, but I was too scared to move,” she said.
“ Everybody’s afraid. The only difference between a hero and a coward is that for a few seconds the hero is able to overcome his fear. Then he goes back to being afraid again, like anybody else.”
“ Were you afraid like that in Vietnam?”
“ Everyday.”
“ And in the POW camp, were you afraid then?”
“ Everyday.”
“ But you overcame your fear.”
“ No, I learned to live with it, but I never overcame it.”
“ What’s the most afraid you ever were? Was it when you were in combat or in the camp?” She seemed to be obsessed with the idea of fear.
“ Oh my God!” She jumped out of the chair. “It’s a spider,” She hopped onto the bed, a mass of goosebumps and jiggling breasts. “Spider,” she said again, pointing to a common garden spider making its way across the bureau next to the chair.
“ Stay here.” He laughed, got off the bed, went into the bathroom and got a water glass.
“ Aren’t you going to kill it?”
“ What for? It doesn’t mean us harm.” He smiled at her, made a show of sneaking up on the spider and, with a flourish, covered it with the glass. “Now we need a piece of paper,” he said. “Check the nightstand.”
“ Lots easier to kill it.” She scooted across the bed, opened the drawer, took out a tablet of hotel stationery, tore off a sheet and handed it to him.
“ I never kill spiders. They eat the bad bugs.”
“ What bad bugs?”
“ Mosquitoes, fleas, flies-the bad bugs.” He slid the paper under the glass and, with the spider safely enclosed, picked it up, one hand on the glass, the other holding the paper securely underneath. “Would you get the door?”
She hopped off the bed, opened the door and watched as he pulled the paper away, flinging the spider out into the night.
“ Good riddance.” She took her place in the armchair once again.
He smiled and closed the door.
“ You didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“ What question?”
“ What’s the most afraid you ever were?”
He was quiet for a few seconds, then said. “When I was little, I used to play cowboys and Indians with the neighborhood kids. I was always the sheriff and David was always the Indian chief. The goal was to capture and tie up the enemy. Usually to the clothesline.”
“ Clothesline?” she interrupted.
“ Yeah, the clothesline. You don’t see them like you used to now that everybody has a dryer, but in the neighborhood where we grew up we all had them, two poles cemented into the ground with a tee on top and four lines running between.”
“ I know what a clothesline is, I just can’t imaging tying someone to the line.”
“ Not the line, the poles. There were generally five or six kids per side, but there could be as many as ten. We would travel the block in twos or threes, searching out the enemy. If we could find and overpower them, we would take them to David’s or my backyard and tie them up. Once bound you were out of action for the rest of the game, or until you were freed by your side.”
“ Wouldn’t your team just untie you right away?” She asked.
“ If they could, but once you had captives you left a guard.”
“ Oh.”
“ The last day of summer, before we entered the sixth grade, we were playing the game. We were down by five, with one to go. Two boys were tied to the poles, three more were tied hands and feet, wriggling on the grass like giant worms. I was one of the three. It was a hot September day, probably in the high nineties, so a lot of us were playing without shirts. As you can imagine, it gets pretty hot laying on the grass, baking in the sun.”
“ Didn’t you get sunburned?” She asked.
“ A little,” he said, as his mind took him back.
Jerry Delawarean and his younger brother, Little Bobby, were tied to the clothesline poles. Little Bobby was crying, he was only seven and not used to the game. Ricky Stewart, John Morgan and himself, were tied with their hands behind their backs. Their feet were tied too.
“ Shut up Bobby.” His brother was the only one that didn’t call him Little Bobby.
“ I don’t wanna play anymore. I wanna go home.”
“ You been bugging us to play and we finally let you and now ya wanna quit,” his brother said.
“ I didn’t wanna get tied up,” he wailed.
“ What did the little shit think was gonna happen?” John Morgan said. He was the only kid on the block that swore. “He’s too little to capture anybody by himself and too slow to get away, ’course he was gonna get caught first thing. Happened to me too when I was a kid, but I didn’t whine about it when I got caught.” John Morgan, at twelve, was the oldest kid in the game and it took three kids to capture and hold him. Even with the no hitting rule, there were no two he couldn’t get away from.
“ Where did Beanie go?” Ricky asked. Beanie was Donny Greenwood, called Beanie because he was Jewish and had to wear a yarmulke to temple on Saturdays. “He’s supposed to be guarding us.”
“ Out looking for Rex probably,” John said. Rex Russell was the last cowboy in play.
“ I bet Rex has got ’em all captured,” Ricky said. Only on a rare occasion did a game come down to the guard. Guards weren’t supposed to leave their posts, but they always did.
“ Naw, if he did, he’d come let us go.”
“ Not Rex,” Little Bobby said, sniffling, “he’d go home and leave us here till dark.”
“ He’s right,” John said, “that son of a bitch would leave us here till dark. We’ll burn red as beets.”
“ My mom’s gonna be pissed off,” Ricky said. That was the first time Jim heard Ricky swear.
“ We gotta get outta here,” Little Bobby said, looking at his brother.
“ Okay, okay,” Jerry said, “can anybody get loose?”
“ I think I can,” Jim said.
They all turned their eyes on Jim. If anybody could slip out of the ropes, he could. He was the skinniest and most agile. They watched as he twisted and turned, grunted and groaned, but after fifteen minutes of sweating and struggling he was no closer to loosening his bonds than when he had started.
“ I can’t get loose.” He was breathing hard.
“ You’re turning red, Jimmy,” Little Bobby said. Jim had fair skin and sunburned easily. He should have kept his shirt on. Rolling around in the grass made him itch like crazy and now he was starting to feel the burn. He tried again to squeeze his hands through the rope, but still he couldn’t.
“ I’m gonna get into the shade.” He rolled across the yard to the shade offered by the garage. Once out of the sun he relaxed and caught his breath. He still itched, but at least he wouldn’t burn anymore.
“ Jimmy, maybe if you sit up by the corner of the garage, you can cut through your ropes,” Jerry said.
Jim scooted over to the corner of the stucco garage and sat up with his back next to where two walls met and he started rubbing his hands up and down in an attempt to fray the ropes.
“ Black widow,” Little Bobby screamed.
Jim stopped his rubbing, his companions were silent. “Where?” he asked, quietly.
“ By your leg.”
Jim looked down and saw it. Big, black, marble shaped and it was crawling up onto his leg.
“ Don’t move,” Jerry said, a tremor in his voice.
“ Yeah, stay real still and maybe it’ll go away,” Ricky said.
“ I’d roll over and squash it,” John said.
“ No, don’t do that, you might piss it off and it’ll bite,” Ricky said, getting used to swearing.
“ Not if it’s fucking squashed,” John swore.
Jim froze, hoping his Levi’s were too thick for it to bite through, but not sure. He felt the sweat rolling of his sunburned back as it climbed up and sat on his knee. His comrades were mute, holding their breath, eyes glued to the spider.
It sat there for several minutes, holding the boys spellbound. They were quiet, keen and aware. The only sounds, their shallow breathing and the breeze rustling through the tall tree in the corner of the yard. Jim was paralyzed.
The spider began to move back the way it had come.
“ When it gets on the grass, roll away from it,” Jerry said.
“ Yeah, get away from it,” Ricky echoed. “That’s what I’d do.”
“ Roll over and squash it. Smash it dead,” John offered.
As if hearing John, the spider stopped and climbed back up on the knee, sat for a second, like it was surveying the situation, then started a trek up Jim’s pant leg.
“ Do something!” Little Bobby squealed, his tears forgotten.
The spider stopped and sat atop Jim’s groin.
“ It’s on his dick,” John Morgan said. “Better do something quick.”
Jim’s bladder gave way.
“ He pissed himself,” John Morgan said and Jim knew, scared as he was, he would never live it down.
The hot urine welling up around the spider startled it and it scooted away from the source of the wet in a sideways movement coming to rest above Jim’s bare belly button.
“ That’s bad,” Little Bobby said.
“ Shoulda rolled over and squashed it,” John said.
Jim remained paralyzed, with his back against the garage and once again the boys turned silent, waiting with bated breath and wide eyes. The spider remained rock still, rising and falling with Jim’s quivering breath.
“ Help!” Little Bobby belted out, his cry piercing the silence like a white hot knife.
“ Help! Help!” Ricky and Jerry chimed in.
“ Help!” John Morgan’s loud voice added to the cadence.
“ What’s going on?” David’s mother screamed, coming out the back door.
“ Black widow, on Jimmy!” John Morgan said.
Cynthia Askew started toward Jimmy just as he felt a pinching sensation in his abdomen. David’s mother swatted the spider off his belly, then squashed it with her foot. Jim passed out. Three days later he came home from the hospital. He spent the next five years overcoming his fear of spiders.
He told Roma the whole story, omitting only the part about wetting his pants.
“ You and your sister are the only people alive that know about that,” he said, after he finished the telling. “It’s always been my deepest secret.”
“ Why?”
“ I was paralyzed with fear, no one likes to admit that.”
“ What about the boys?” she asked.
“ Except for David, who was killed yesterday, the cowboys have been dead forever. Jerry and his brother, Little Bobby, were killed in high school when the car Jerry was driving was hit by a drunk driver. John Morgan stepped on a land mine just outside Saigon. Ricky Stewart died of leukemia on his fourteenth birthday. David’s mother has been dead for years. I told Julia one night when we were swapping secrets, I don’t know why I told you, because you asked, I guess, or maybe because I’ve always loved you.”
“ But you overcame your fear of spiders. You should be proud of that.”
“ I just wanted to forget about that horrible afternoon, being afraid every time I saw a spider was no way to forget. Once I got used to not being afraid of them, I started to like them. Now I go out of my way to help them. I’d never kill one. Not now.”
“ I’ve always loved you too,” she said.
All of a sudden he was extremely aware of Roma’s bared breasts. “I’ve never been with anyone but Julia,” he said.
“ I suspected as much,” she said.
“ How did you know?”
“ I don’t know. I guess a woman just knows these things, but I’ll confess I don’t understand why. Were you afraid of girls?”
“ No. I was a good Catholic boy. I was a virgin at eighteen when I went into the service, still a virgin when I was sent to Vietnam, where God knows I had plenty of opportunity, but I couldn’t bring myself to go a prostitute, so I remained a virgin till I was captured. Not many girls in a POW camp. I was twenty-three when I got home and pretty fucked up. By the time I got it together, I was halfway through my thirties, too old and too embarrassed to start dating, so I just put it out of my mind and concentrated on making money. Then I met you and fell in love, but you went away with me still celibate.”
“ Julia never told me.”
“ Julia never knew.”
“ How?”
“ The first time we did it she was too drunk to notice my fumbling around. After that first night I was an expert.”
“ She was pretty experienced,” Roma said.
“ She once told me she made a lot of men very happy, in her own shy way,” Jim said.
“ That’s my sister. I love her dearly, but she always was a little slut.” Roma laughed. “She was always faithful to you though. After she got married she stopped her catting around.”
“ Till she met Kohler,” Jim said.
She sat still in the armchair and eyed him.
“ Take your pants off,” she said with a sly grin.
“ No,” he said.
“ I’ll bet you’d take them off for Julia.”
“ You’re not her.”
“ Pretend I am.” She smiled wider.
“ I don’t know if I can,” he said.
“ Don’t be a prude, take them off,” Donna thought.
“ Stay out of this,” He thought back.
“ Take ’em off!” Roma commanded.
“ Do it!” Donna commanded.
He stared at Roma’s rising and falling breasts and he felt Donna inside him.
“ I can feel it getting hard,” Donna thought.
“ I told you to stay out of this.” He wondered if it was possible to forget about Donna for a while.
“ Come on, Jimmy, slip them off,” Roma chided.
He moved his gaze up to her eyes and was trapped in her exotic stare. He pulled down the zipper, slipped the pants off, taking the underwear along for the ride.
“ Julia said you were big.” She eyed his erection.
“ Wow, look at it, sticking up hard as a rock. I can feel it. It’s so great. No wonder men get so horny.” Donna’s excitement caused Jim to shiver and he blushed.
“ Now the tie.” Roma laughed and he whipped it off, then the vest, followed by the shirt. Jim ignored the buttons, lifting it over his head and tossing it on the floor with the rest of his clothes, leaving himself naked, except for his socks and his cast. He lay back against the headboard and met her eyes.
“ Socks off,” she kidded.
He was speechless, but not powerless. He took off the socks, tossed them after the rest of his clothes.
“ Now it’s my turn.” She stood up, keeping Jim locked in her stare and finished unbuttoning the Levi’s. Jim tore his eyes away from hers and moved them back down to her breasts. Her nipples were hard, pointed and perfect and they quivered as she worked at her pants. His eyes roved down from her breasts and watched what her hands were doing. He smiled and felt the heat of his erection run through him, when the pale pink of her panties peeked through. He returned his gaze to her erotic eyes.
She winked and offered him her half smile, while hooking her thumbs into the pant waist and pulling the Levi’s off. She stood and faced him for a few seconds, clad only in pale pink panties, the black vee of her pubic hair clearly showing through.
“ She’s beautiful. So beautiful,” Donna offered. Jim ignored her as Roma slipped the panties off and kicked them out of the way.
“ We were made for each other.” Roma faced him, nude, with her arms at her sides and tears in her eyes. “If you only knew how much I need you right now.”
“ I need you too,” he said, meaning it like he’d never meant anything before. All his troubles seemed to fade away. At that moment he only had eyes for Roma. She was the beginning, middle and end of his life. “And I love you.”
“ I love you too.” The half smile turned full as she approached. She eased onto the bed, snuggled up next to him, reached between his legs, taking him in her hand, gently squeezing.
“ Oh my, that feels sooooo good, don’t let her stop.”
But Jim wasn’t listening to Donna. After a few minutes he rolled Roma onto her back and kissed her breasts, before moving up to her mouth and covering her lips with his. He tasted the salt from her tears and started to pull away, when she wrapped her arms tightly around him, drawing him to her. He entered her and they made love, slowly at first, feeling each other out, then gradually they increased the tempo till they turned into a runaway train.
They climaxed together, silently, holding on to each other, not like it was the first time for them, but like it was the last time for forever. When it was over they hugged like young lovers, fiercely and tenderly and Jim lay lost with the wonder of her and wondered how differently things would have turned out if he’d married her instead of her twin.
“ I’d love to stay and spend more time with you, but I gotta get next door before Edna gets back.” She laughed. “Listen to me, I’m acting like she’s my mother and I might get in trouble.” But she got out of bed and started dressing.
Too quickly he was alone with his thoughts, then he closed his eyes and the last thing he remembered before he fell asleep was Donna in his head, saying, “So that’s what it’s like for a man. It’s so wonderful.”