Fortunate Son

Drew wasn’t visiting from back East. He’d dropped out of school and come back to L.A. a year before. He called her when Eric wasn’t home and begged her to come back to him.

Her departure from his life, it seemed, left a wound that would not heal.

She still liked Drew. She cared for him. But after months of his begging and after years of Eric’s cool detachment, she couldn’t take any more. So when Eric went away to keep from getting Mona sick (as if, she thought, his germs were deadlier than other people’s), Christie said okay when Drew wanted to come over. She said to herself that she merely 2 0 9

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wanted company, to have her own life. Maybe they would have dinner and talk about old times, she had thought. Her mother had wanted to spend time with Mona, and so Christie packed her an overnight bag.

Drew tried to kiss her at the front door, but she pushed him away and said that if he did that again he’d have to leave.

She meant that. He apologized nicely, and they sat down on separate chairs in the living room in front of the window that looked out over Santa Monica.

They started out talking about his paintings. There was a gallery in San Jose interested in showing two canvases. They were paintings of Christie the way he remembered her when they’d gone to Catalina Island for the weekend once. They were nudes. He’d love to show them to her. To him she had always been the ideal of beauty. He loved her then and he still did. He dreamed about her; he told her he dated women who looked like her. He had dropped out of school to be near her.

“I love only you,” he said at last.

Her anger at Eric and the pathetic bleating of Drew came together in Christie’s brow.

“It has nothing to do with you, Drew,” she said, affecting a gentle tone. “It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“It’s just that Eric is so wonderful.” She felt a perverse satisfaction seeing the pain entering Drew’s face. “It’s not just that I love him, but he’s got everything a woman could want in a man. That day he beat you on the tennis court I called him.

We went for a drive, and I told him that I loved you and I wanted to be just friends. But he took me in the backseat and made love to me until I was completely his. I didn’t even want to be with him, but he made himself my man.”

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The tears flowing from Drew’s eyes were a balm for Christie’s ragged heart. She loved hurting Drew, but at the same time she told herself that it was for his own good.

“Stop,” he said.

“From that first night, we got together whenever I could get away from you,” she continued. “You remember that stain on the roof of my car? That was Eric. His dick is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, and when he came it was so hard that I could feel it inside.”

“Stop, Christie.”

“You can leave whenever you want, Drew. You’re telling me how much you love me. I’m just telling you how I feel.”

She expected him to jump to his feet and run from the apartment. She wanted to make him run, to feel the pain that she felt. She realized that she really did blame him for not being man enough to keep her.

But when he did stand up, it was only so that he could fall to his knees and press his face against her skirted lap.

“Why are you doing this?” came his muffled cry.

“You’re always calling me,” she said in the same removed tone Eric used when he told her he loved her. “Telling me how you feel. But I’m not the person you think I am. That whole summer after we graduated, I fucked Eric every day.

Sometimes I’d be with him and then come to be with you for a while, and then I’d go back and Eric would fuck me again. I didn’t want to be with him, but I couldn’t help it. I had to go.

And I didn’t care about what I was doing to you . . .”

As she spoke, her voice became a whisper; she leaned over him and her skirt slowly rose from the movement of him shaking his head, trying to deny her words.

“You wanted me to kiss your dick, and when I finally did you didn’t know that I had been doing Eric like that since the 2 1 1

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first night in my car. He didn’t ask me if I would, he just shoved it into my mouth and held my head so I couldn’t move.”

Drew slammed the arm of the chair with his fist.

“No!”

Christie realized that there was a new person coming out of her. She’d never talked like this, never tortured anyone like this. She felt Drew’s hands on her naked thighs and she liked it.

When he looked up at her she said, “Put your head back down.”

“When my parents were gone he came to my house,” she continued. “When you called on the phone I was in the bed with him. When I answered sometimes I was licking his cock while you went on and on about Yale and what you would do there.”

That was when Drew pushed her panties aside and pressed the flat of his tongue against her clitoris.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Once . . . once he came in my mouth while you were asking what kind of tux you should wear to the prom.”