Read Online The Birth of Bane by Richard Heredia - Free Book Online

in fact marry. After meeting, there was really never anyone
else for us. I counted myself lucky, and I hope she feels the
same.
    She must’ve,
right? She’s still here trying to read over my shoulder as I write
this.
    Now, she’s
pulling my ear, telling me not to put this in the book.
    Too bad, babe!
Y ou shouldn’t be peaking in the
first place.
    So, we finished
one another orally, sated, but still curious if we could figure the
whole sex-thing out with a second try. We laughed about it, holding
each other tight, loving the feeling of our naked bodies against
each other. We talked as we fondled, expressed our dreams,
touching, luxuriating in the sensations of others’ body. We kissed
and caressed until late in the afternoon, content to stay nude and
enjoy the moment to the fullest.
    Finally, Myra
got up and said she had to go.
    I asked her if
she needed for me to walk her home, but she said no. Her friend
Feline was going to pick her up, so it would look like she’d spent
time at her house, instead of mine.
    “ I don’t want my
mom to get the impression I was out all day getting boned,” she had
said playfully, even though that wasn’t quite true.
    When she stooped
to pick up her clothes, we were surprised when we couldn’t find her
panties. We searched everywhere in my room. When Feline had honked
for the fourth time, we were still looking.
    Exasperated,
Myra left holding down her min-skirt, hoping she wasn’t going to
flash the neighbors, as she made her way down to her friends’
car.
    I watched her
leave from the kitchen windows, sad over her having to leave and
also a little sad we were no longer kids anymore. Something had
changed within us both. Though not fully consummated, the intent
had been there. I’d been poised before the gates so to speak, but
her physiological “smallness” had made that
impossibility.
    I’m not a boy
anymore , I remember thinking
just as my mother came up behind me and hugged me tight.
    It never even
entered my mind that she wasn’t due home for a few more hours. She
still had to stop and pick up Eli from his afterschool program
before she would drive home. In fact, Valerie wasn’t even due home
for another half hour.
    The embrace had
been so warm and loving. It was precisely the way my mother hugged
me from behind, which she did from time to time. She would do it
when I wasn’t expecting it, but when she was feeling her love
for me in her heart. I know this, because I was always able to feel
her emotions from her body traveling into the back of
mine.
    It felt exactly
the same. She was telling me it was ok. I had to grow up
sometime.
    And yet, it
should’ve dawned on me my mother would never have given me a hug of
this sort if she knew the topic wherein my feelings were based. She
would’ve never approved of me and Myra having sex. Therefore, she
would’ve never hugged me over losing my innocence.
    All of this was
going through my head when I turned to tell ask her why she would
hug me like this, knowing the root of the change within
me.
    There was no one
there.
    I was alone, and
not just in the kitchen. I was the only person in the house. I was
the only person standing on the property.
    And yet, someone
had hugged me. I could smell the residual perfume on my
clothes…
    I realized then,
eyes widening. It wasn’t a scent my mother wore. Though this person
had embraced me in precisely the same manner, had conveyed love and
care in exactly as my mother would’ve, this was a different person
altogether.
    Someone else had
touched me. Someone else was in the house with us. That, I could no
longer deny.
    The following
morning, I found Myra’s teeny, tiny bikini panties stuffed within
the cap of my deodorant can. How they got there, I couldn’t tell
you. It was another one of those things I was never able to figure
out.
    When I gave them
back to my girlfriend sometime later, she asked where I found them.
I lied about it, saying I found them under my bed, stuffed near