Homeward Bound Ch. 02

But he was in no mood to ask for rights and privileges. He was on me in a flash. I wrestled with him, bumping the headboard hard against the wall and sending the springs of the bed screaming angrily. Shocked by the surprise and the unexpected noise, and his dick already a couple of inches inside me, which, after the high I'd been in from Samuel's fucking, I was of two minds about having there, I stopped fighting.

He pulled me down off the bed, momentarily dislodging his cock from my hole, and I murmured, "No, please." I don't know what he made of that. I don't know what I meant by it—it scares me to think that I was murmuring my wish that he not withdraw from inside me.

I was on my hands and knees on the braided rug beside the bed. And he left me there, covering my back with his chest. And then he was inside me again, pumping me quick and hard and breathing heavily in my ear.

"Getting it as good as that big black bastard, aren't you?"

I wasn't, but I was getting it good enough not to struggle with him. He wasn't stroking as hard or deep or thick as Samuel did. But he was stroking. And right now that was all that mattered. He was showing me that Samuel was not the end of it. That it could keep going.

He didn't last long, and when he was spent, he just pulled out of me and was gone. But I was floating along, conflicted and feeling guilty, but not sorry it happened. I rolled over on the braided rug and ran my hand down my belly and stroked myself to completion.

I dozed then, but was half awake when I heard the murmuring on the other side of the door. Then the scrape of the hinges. And there were two of them in the room with me then. The shoe salesman had returned and also an older, heavier man, who I didn't identify until the next morning.

The older man had a stubby, but quite thick cock, and when he pushed his knees under my buttocks as he pushed my legs open, I had to wrap my legs around his waist to keep him inside me. But I did that, moaning all along because the salesman was tonguing and nipping at my nipples, giving me sensations that Samuel didn't and bringing memories of Seth back to me.

The salesman fucked me a second time, taking more time at it then and more expertly finding the sensitive spots along my channel that made me groan and gasp.

In the morning, I found that I hadn't been the only one screwed in the night. The salesman had absconded without paying his dollar fee for the room and board—and, worse, so did a man with his family that had been with us for a week. I never could quite figure out how that man had gotten into and out of his wife's bed that night without waking her.

So, my mother was as screwed by these men as I had been. In later life, I had to smile ironically at that, though, as it led to what she caused me to drift into.

One or both of the men—I prefer to think it was the salesman—must have enjoyed his night quite a bit, enough to talk of it. Because suddenly our boarding house became quite popular. And my mother, though feigning outrage and indignation, didn't hand the money men now appearing at her door and asking for the extra service back to them once she'd realized what they were asking—and after she caught Samuel fucking me behind the latticework under the rear porch one afternoon.

What she did was give me a slightly better room at the back of the house, on the other side of the kitchen from the guest wing, with a private hallway leading back to it with no other guest room doors off it. And she put an Oriental carpet on the floor there that nearly filled the room and muffled the sound of the bed rocking on the floor. And she moved the brass bed to the center of the room where the headboard wouldn't bounce off the wall and had Samuel oil the springs before giving him notice to find other work. And she put on a strong thick mattress.

I told her I didn't necessarily like the idea—and would be finding out where Samuel went. She told me I didn't have a choice in the matter if I wanted room and board myself. And that I'd be too tired to go looking for Samuel. As usual, she was right.

In the late fall of 1918, she saved my life for the last time. The Spanish flu ripped through Asheville probably worse than almost anywhere else in the United States. The railroad that had been the city's angel of life now was its angel of death, bringing in waves and waves of people coming for the cure for something that the mountain air and sulfur waters could not cure.

I got the fever and lay in my bed close to death for nearly a week. The entire time my mother was there, at my side, fighting for my recovery. I recovered, but she then contracted it and didn't beat it.

Within a week of her death I was informed that her ambitious construction program meant that the bank had a whole lot more ownership rights over the boarding house than I did and that it would be auctioned off from underneath me.

That's when Mrs. Childress of the Swannanoa Boarding House over on Woodfin sauntered up my walk and settled in the rocking chair next to mine and told me she would be happy to offer me the same position at her boarding house that I had here at my mother's boarding house.

"The exactly same duties," she said slowly and deliberately. And then she gave me a piercing stare, no doubt wondering if I realized what she was offering. I did. But she shot it home by adding, "Except that I'll give you half of whatever the men give me. And if they give you extra, you can keep it. I knew your mother well. My offering is much better, I'm sure, than hers ever was."

In that she was right. And when I didn't realize enough money for my part of the auction of mother's boarding house to return to college, I collected up my scant belongs and my handwritten manuscripts, and I moved over to a small bedroom made from the end of an upstairs hallway at Mrs. Childress's.

When I pointed out that my mother had put my bed in the center of the room and the room was at the back of the house—noting that Mrs. Childress's room was right next to mine—she just smiled and said she'd manage to endure the inconveniences.