Jimmy (2 page)

     The walk home from the Hood place didn’t take long.  Once there, however, he had trouble relaxing because he kept thinking about Samantha and all the things he could do to her, which in turn caused an erection to press against his pants, one he didn’t want to deal with because later that night he planned on going back to the fallout shelter, and he didn’t want to be depleted.  Unfortunately he couldn’t hold back and after looking at the clock and realizing his brother still had about fifteen minutes of detention time left, he headed up to his room and opened up one of his downloaded videos. 

     On screen a girl in a leather outfit was standing with her wrists tied over her head, a large ball gag in her mouth.  Having watched the video many times Jimmy knew that it wouldn’t be long before the girl was lowered to her knees and forced to suck dick, the ball gag having been removed.  Later it would be put back in place once the man had deposited his load in her mouth.  Jimmy didn’t make it that far into the scene before he found himself burying another pair of underpants in the hamper, one which already had three pairs at the bottom despite his doing laundry two days earlier, crusty patches of semen clinging to each.

     An odd but familiar disgust greeted him once he was finished, only this time it was not a result of how much money he had wasted on the kinky video downloads.  Instead it was the knowledge that he had finally given in to the desire.  All his life he had dreamed of kidnapping and tying up a girl so she had to stand with her wrists pulled over her head for days at a time, but had always been able to keep the desire a fantasy.  Now it was a reality, one which he had often feared finding himself in because it would mean he had crossed the line. 

     Of course the feeling would pass.  It always did with the videos and would with this situation as well.  Also, deep down inside Jimmy knew it would only have been a matter of time before he did something like this anyway; once a fantasy was firmly in place in a persons brain there was no getting around it.  He couldn’t suppress his sexual desire anymore than a homosexual could suppress theirs and no amount of ‘sexual reeducation therapy’ would have helped.    

*  *  *

     Her hands began to tingle half an hour after Jimmy left, and she desperately wanted free.  Never before had Samantha stood like this for so long and already her legs were feeling weak and her lower back tired.  Her hands were the worst, however, because whenever she relaxed her feet or legs the rope would tighten around her wrists and cut the blood flow off.  Even when standing tall, her toes holding up her entire body, the ropes were uncomfortable.

     The spot where Jimmy had hit her with the belt also hurt, though the pain from the lashing had faded considerably since his departure. 
What would ten hits feel like?  Or twenty?  Or thirty?  And what would the other things he did to her be like?
  Thinking about this chilled her to the core. 

     Tears once again began falling from her eyes.  She managed to brush some of them away with the inside of her arm, but most ran down her cheeks and fell to the floor.

     She shifted her position.  The pressure on her wrists grew.  She tried raising her arms higher than the rope but it was an impossible task.  Even if the rope were removed her exhausted muscles would not allow such an extension.  Already they were screaming to have her arms lowered.

     Curious as to what her hands looked like Samantha forced her head back and looked up.  The rope that bound her wrists had been wrapped around several times before being knotted.  A second rope was then tied to the first and then ran over a pipe in the ceiling before being tied to the one coming out of the wall.

     Jimmy had said something about punishing her if she tried to escape, but really, given the tightness of the ropes, it was something he didn’t need to worry about.  There was no way she would get free without help. 

     Her neck began to ache so she let it fall toward her chest again.  Her eyes studied her shoes, yet her mind ignored them, and instead focused on her parents. 

     What were they thinking?

     Were they even home yet?

     Samantha had no idea what time it was.  It seemed as if hours upon hours had passed, yet she knew this probably was not the case. 

     Her eyes moved from her feet and looked around the room.  There was no clock.  The place was not barren though.  Fear of some sort of world war outbreak had caused the Hood family to stockpile many supplies inside the small fallout shelter.  Wooden shelves ran the length of the entire wall to her left, canned foods, dry goods, and bottled water piled high upon them.  The other side of the room had several coils of rope stacked one on top of the other.  There were only two shelves on the right side, and upon them sat light bulbs and cleaning supplies.  Between the two walls was a simple doorway, the opening closed off by a huge steel structure that had no window or openings of any kind.  On the other side was the stairway, and the world she had once taken for granted.

*  *  *

     “I really don’t know why I even try anymore,” Alan said after cracking open a bottle of Coke from the fridge.  “The teachers are so focused on being right that they can’t stand to see a ‘kid’ like me correct them.”

     Jimmy smiled.  Alan’s detention had been a result of being disrespectful to a substitute teacher in math class the Friday before.  According to Alan, a girl had asked if he had an extra pencil, which he did, but then accidentally dropped while handing it to her.  It was his vocal apology that had landed him in trouble, the substitute teacher deciding to scold him for speaking when they were supposed to be quiet.  Alan had tried to explain that he was simply apologizing for dropping the pencil and the substitute had exploded.  Not long after that Alan had been in the assistant principal’s office learning his unjust sentence for being polite.  “I think you should write to Oprah about it.”

     “Yeah, but then I’d probably get suspended or something.  Remember that kid that got in trouble with Facebook?”

     Jimmy remembered several stories of kids getting in trouble for things they had written on Facebook, which the school tried to monitor either with fake profiles or reports from kiss-up students, and not just in Ashland Creek, but in places all across the country.  Actually teachers were getting in trouble too, the memory of a California teacher being fired for posting pictures of herself drinking while on summer vacation coming to mind.  It was ridiculous.  “Which kid?”

     “Oh it doesn’t really matter,” Alan said with a wave of the hand.  “I’m just glad summers almost here so I don’t have to deal with this bullshit anymore.”

     “Yeah,” Jimmy said, his mind suddenly focusing in on the fact that he had no idea what he was going to do now that he was almost finished with high school.  Most of the other kids in his class had plans, the majority either going to college or the military.  Some had jobs lined up.  Jimmy had none of that, though his grades would have been good enough to get into most colleges.  The trouble was he hadn’t applied anywhere because college just didn’t seem right for him.  He also feared going into the military, not because he was scared of going to war – he actually relished the idea of going into combat -- but because he worried that he would have no outlet for his bondage fantasies. 

     Then again, up until today, he had never had an outlet anyway, the movies online and the videos he ordered from catalogs having been his only release since hitting puberty.

     “You hungry?” Alan asked.

     “Um, yeah,” Jimmy said.  Earlier during lunch he had been too nervous to eat, the thoughts of grabbing Samantha after school having taken over his mind. 

     “Let’s go to Taco Bell.”   

     “Sounds good.” 

     With that the two started walking into town, a trip they often took when they were bored or hungry.  The journey took them by the Hood place.  Jimmy looked toward it, his mind picturing Samantha suffering in the secret fallout shelter.  Once beyond the house, however, he went back to thinking about Taco Bell and the tasty Cheesy Gordita Crunches he would be devouring.

Chapter Two

     Tina Thompson had been debating with herself for two days on whether she was going to ask Jimmy to the prom.  During this time she had been waiting for him to do it, but he hadn’t, and now prom tickets were only being sold for one more day.  She was going to have to do it.

     Tina had first met Jimmy Hawthorn in the lunch cafeteria way back in January when she had been forced to move from Glen Ellyn to Ashland Creek to live with her estranged mother after her father had died in a car accident coming home from a business dinner in Chicago.  It had been a hard move, one she had not wanted to make, and it had only been made worse at school as she had gone from class to class on her first day at Ashland Creek High because no one wanted to talk with her.  All the little groups were full, and were not looking for new members.  Later she realized her shyness had probably played a part as well, but at the time it was an unknown factor.

     Lunch, of course, was the worst because she had nowhere to sit.  Seats in a classroom didn’t really become group possessions, but lunch tables did, and if one sat at the wrong table there was generally trouble.  There were open seats around the room, but none of the tables seemed that inviting.  The students at each were happily talking among themselves, and did not need her to join them. 

     After five minutes of standing by the wall with a tray of greasy food, Tina had noticed a boy sitting alone at the end of a half-filled table.  Rather than talking with the four kids on the one end he was writing something while eating an apple. 

     Tina debated for a few seconds on what to do, and then finally decided to sit with him. 

     “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

     He looked up.  “Um, no, go ahead.”  His voice had a startled ring to it, though he did not seem at all annoyed about the interruption.

     “Thank you.”  She put her tray of food down and took a seat.  It was a relief not to be standing.

     He looked back down at his apple.

     An uncomfortable silence settled.

     Eventually she said, “I’m Tina.  Today’s my first day.”

     “Oh,” he said without looking up.  “I’m Jimmy.”  His fingers began peeling away the sticker on the uneaten portion of apple.

     Tina thought for a second, her mind desperately wanting a conversation, yet at the same time not wanting to press him too much or ask the wrong question.  “How come you’re sitting all alone?”  She regretted the question before it even left her lips, yet was unable to stop its progress.

     He shrugged while giving a weak smile and said, “I don’t know, I just like to I guess.  It gives me time to think.”

     “Oh.” 
Did that mean he still wanted to be alone?
  “But it’s okay if I sit here?” 

     He looked up, a partial smile forming and said, “Yeah of course, I don’t mind.”

     “Good, because I don’t know anyone yet and, well, it’s hard.”  She opened her hamburger while speaking and took a bite.  It was awful.  The bun was stale and the meat not meaty. 

     “Oh, well, first days are hard,” Jimmy said.  “Especially in a town like this where everyone has known each other since day one.”

     “I guess you were a new student too at some point?” Tina asked.

     “No, no, I grew up here.”

    
Yet you are sitting all alone?
  For some reason this intrigued her, especially since he didn’t look like an outcast -- outcasts usually didn’t have muscles pushing against a normal everyday hooded sweatshirt - and the two had talked for the rest of the lunch period.  After that they realized they each had gym together during the next period and walked to it while talking, and then, at the end of the day, the two stumbled upon each other again outside the building, and walked home, Jimmy and his little brother Alan showing her the way to her mother’s house, which was on the way to their own. 

     Now, several months later, Tina continued the debate on whether to call Jimmy and ask him to the prom.  She had hoped he would do it, but apparently he wasn’t going to despite the fact that the two were good friends.  Unlike most teenage girls Tina was not insulted.  During their months of friendship she had learned quite a bit about Jimmy’s personality and knew he rarely worked up the effort or motivation to do anything out of the ordinary - things like talking to people he did not know, staying after to speak with a teacher if he didn’t understand something, walking a different route between classes, and asking a young pretty girl that he obviously liked very much to go with him to prom. 

     The debate ended.

     She would have to make the move that brought their friendship to the next level.

*  *  *

     “Sorry, Mom, I’m still full too,” Jimmy said while pushing his plate away from his seat, one which contained enough meat and potatoes to feed a starving family.  “I’ll eat it tomorrow for lunch, I promise.”

     Kelly Hawthorn gave her two sons a disappointed look, which she enhanced by crossing her arms, and said, “What on earth possessed you two to stuff yourself with Taco Bell so close to dinnertime?”