This Is Between Us by Kevin Sampsell Read Free Book Online Page A

from when he was five with a light attached to it, like a miner’s. He squeezed it onto his eleven-year-old head.
    For dinner we ate salad, with candles lighting the table. After that, we made up a game called Darkness Monster, which was basically hide-and-seek in the dark with flashlights. It turned out to be a really fun game until Maxine stubbed her toe on the couch.
    After we put the kids to bed, we found our old alarm clocks and wound them up and put them on our bedside table (we had to wake up at 7:00 AM for school). I tried to read with Vince’s hard hat on my head but it kept falling off and then its light burned out. You were using your flashlight to make animal shadows on the wall. “Let me see your hand,” you said. You tried to incorporate it into something you were doing, an elephant or some kind of bird. The way you were touching my hand got me excited. You shined your flashlight on the bulge in my shorts and then scooted down. “Let’s see what this can turn into,” you said. You slipped my shorts off and put the flashlight up close to my cock. You circled it with the beam, like a helicopter light looking for a criminal on the run. The room was totally dark except my cock in the spotlight. Then I saw half of your face enter the light and the cock disappeared. I grabbed the flashlight and angled it so that I could see the new shadows you were making with me.
    …
    There was a time when you didn’t want to have oral sex. You said it was a rape scene in a recent movie that was traumatizing you.
    “It’s just a movie,” I said.
    “But it happens,” you said. “It almost happened to me. I mean, it did sort of happen to me. I don’t ever talk about it.”
    “When?” I said. “I didn’t know.”
    “I was fourteen. At music camp. I’m only going to tell you this story once.”
    “Go ahead,” I said. “It’s okay.”
    “It was such a gross place. I was one of the youngest people there and everyone was cracking dirty jokes all the time. Everyone seemed delinquent. There was a break every day that lasted two hours and kids would run off and make out. It was at this big high school in St. Louis. There was a classroom that someone found unlocked, so they called it the mashroom. Guys would tell you to meet them in the mashroom. You could say no if you wanted to but then they’d be really mean to you.”
    I watched your eyes to gauge the pain of the memories, but at the same time my mind was racing forward on its own, filling in blanks. I felt perverse. I looked down at your hands holding each other.
    “I went to the mashroom once, with my friend Susan Pelt. We were going to spy but the door was closed. So we went outside and looked through the window. We saw a girl named Krystal in there with an older boy. They were sort of on top of the teacher’s desk. We heard some muffled sounds but I couldn’t tell what they were doing. She was wearing a shirt that was unbuttoned most of the way and the boy looked like he was squeezing her too hard and sort of humping against her legs. I could see one of her nipples and I stared really hard, trying to get a good look at it because I hadn’t seen another girl’s nipple before. Susan nudged me and said, ‘Maybe we should help her,’ and I looked at her and almost laughed. And then when I looked back, Krystal was sitting up on the desk and buttoning up her shirt. Susan ran away from the window but I wanted to stay and see who was next in the mashroom. But the boy wouldn’t let Krystal leave. He was standing in front of the door and whispering something urgent. He unzipped his pants and I saw his dick. I remember thinking it looked like a finger.”
    You held your hand in front of your face, as if to see what fingers really looked like. Your eyes squinted and then you looked back to me. Instead of smirking or letting out a laugh, you exhaled audibly through your nose.
    “He sort of nodded down at it,” you continued. “And I watched her bend down and