Do You Want Some Company Tonight?

This story is set in 1969. All characters are over the age of eighteen. All sexual acts are consensual. I’d like to thank MissRachael, since I spoke to her some time ago about a few details of this story before I adapted the idea to be a CAW entry. We agree she was a technical consultant, not a writing partner, but her help was valuable. NOTE: Some terms used here may now be considered politically incorrect or offensive. However, they were in common use during the time period of this story.

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“Do you want some company tonight?”

I was on my usual stool in my favorite watering hole. The bartender, Chester, was trading horror stories about women with me since I recently ended a relationship that went sour. The chick had a Women’s Lib bumper sticker on her little MG, but at home she was a clingy whiner. I’m pretty easy to get along with, and I’m very supportive of someone I care about, but this one got to be a pain in the ass. Nothing was ever good enough, she had to work too hard, everyone was out to screw her over, life was unfair, like a damn skipping record. Complaining was what she did best.

Nursing my sanity and my second beer, I wasn’t in the mood for women. I hadn’t even been very horny since the break-up. I turned to look at the guy two stools away who spoke to me. “What did you say?”

He repeated, “Do you want some company tonight?”

The occasional stranger came into this dump, looking for a dick to suck. I can ignore that as long as it’s not my dick. This guy was young and fine-featured, but somehow, he didn’t look like the type. He flashed a nervous smile, so I asked, “What do you mean by company? Do you want to talk about the way Namath and the boys made Baltimore eat their words in Miami last month, or are you getting funny with me?”

The kid blushed. “Look, I’ve never done this before. Maybe I said it wrong. I overheard what you and the bartender said. I thought maybe you might be interested in meeting a nice girl.”

“What are you, a pimp?”

“No! God, no. That’s nasty. No, I wondered if you wanted to meet a girl who likes older guys.”

“If you’re not a pimp, what are you?”

“Her brother.”

“You’re pimping out your sister?” I sputtered.

“No! It’s not like that!”

“All right. What is it like? Here you are, approaching a stranger in a bar, asking if I want to meet your sister for some ‘company’. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

“Please, hear me out. She’s very pretty, has a nice figure and all, but she’s really shy. She’s frustrated.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward me. “She wants to have sex, but no one asks her, so we decided to see if I could help her out.”

“Older sister or younger?” I asked. This guy looked old enough to be in a bar, but he was a lot younger than me.

“Younger,” he said.

“How young?”

“She can’t come in here.”

“So she’s under twenty-one?”

The guy didn’t say anything.

“Kid, how damn young is your sister?”

“Nineteen. Her birthday was last week.”

Shit. This didn’t sound good. The girl I had been bitching about to Chester was twenty-eight, fifteen years younger than me. Her immaturity was the cause of a lot of our problems. What would I want with a girl less than half my age?

“Here, let me show you some pictures.” The kid pulled some dog-eared prints from his pocket. “This was from summer vacation.”

The photo showed a nicely-built young girl, sunbathing in a relatively conservative two-piece at the beach. It was taken from far enough away that I couldn’t really judge the girl’s attractiveness, other than to say she was a slender blond with a decent rack.

The next picture was a full-frame shot of the same girl, smiling at the camera as she put suntan oil on her belly. Now, I could see she was pretty as well as being toned and athletic, like a dancer or swimmer. The sun glistened on her shiny bronze skin.

In the next photo she was on her belly, her long hair tied up on top of her head to expose her neck and shoulders to the sun. She used a rolled up towel as a pillow and had her arms stretched out in front of her. Her bathing suit bottom was rolled and tugged to expose a fair amount of skin, and I had a clear view of the side of one pale breast, since her top was unhooked. Everything looked good, so why was her brother in here showing her pictures to me?

“Does she know you’re in here trying to find some guy to fuck her?” I asked.

No answer.

“Kid!” I said a little louder. “You got a hearing problem or something? I asked you a question.”

“You don’t need to shout,” the young man said. “I heard you just fine. If I take you home to my sister, don’t bother yelling there, either. She’s completely deaf. You could set off a cherry bomb right in front of her, and she wouldn’t hear it.”

“All right. Let’s say I believe you. I’ll ask again – does your deaf-as-a-stone sister know you’re in here trying to pick up some guy to fuck her?”

“If you come home with me, you’ll find out whether I’m telling you the truth about her hearing, mister. And no, she doesn’t know I’m in this particular bar tonight looking for someone. She did ask me to help set her up. Look, she tried to get guys to notice her all through high school, but no one her age wants to go out with a handicapped chick, no matter what she looks like. She’s even tried pen pals, but when she tells guys about her deafness, they don’t write back.”

“So you’re in a bar trying to get a guy over twice her age to go home with you.”

“Beth and I talked – her name’s Beth – and we decided that maybe an older guy would deal with the handicap better.”

“How do you talk with her? Sign language? Is she deaf and dumb?”

“She was born deaf, so she learned to sign like other kids learn to talk. She’s had a lot of speech therapy, so she speaks pretty well. Her German is as good as her English. She can make all the complex consonant sounds easily.”

“You’re telling me your sister speaks two languages but can’t hear. That’s hard to believe.”

“She’s brilliant. Just awkward with people. She started school a year late to allow her to get intensive language therapy, so she was always older than all the kids in her classes. It didn’t help when our parents died in a plane crash when she was fourteen. I had just turned nineteen, so I was awarded guardianship.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re not only the big brother of a lonely, pretty, handicapped girl, you’re also her legal guardian, or were last year. Tonight you’re out in some corner bar, talking up a guy you know nothing about, trying to get me to bang her. If I actually believed any of this shit, I’d be tempted to drag you out in the alley and teach you some decency.”

“Why do you have to be like that? Why don’t you believe me? I showed you her pictures.”

“There are some weird, fucked-up people in this world, kid. I’m not one of them, but maybe you are. You showed me snapshots of some chick on the beach. How do I know who she is? Besides, if I go with you to meet this so-called sister, how do I know there won’t be a couple of your buddies there to beat me up and rob me to buy drugs? I have no way of knowing if anything you told me is true.”

“All right,” the kid said. “How about this? I’ll bring her to the all-night diner down the street. You can meet her there in a public place, and you’ll get to see for yourself what she’s like. I’ll buy you breakfast, and if you don’t like her, you leave. Okay?”

“When?”

“Whenever you like.”

“I’ll meet you there in half an hour,” I said.

“What should I tell her your name is? I’m Nate.”

“Sam.”

“Beth and I will see you in thirty minutes at the diner, Sam,” Nate said, heading for the door.

When the kid was gone, Chester came over to me. “What the hell was that about? I heard some of it.”

“Not sure.”

“You know I run a clean place, Sam. At first, I thought he was a pimp. I was gonna tell Beast over there,” he said, pointing to the giant bouncer dozing in the corner, “to take him out and play kickball with him while I called the cops.”

“He says the girl is his sister. She’s pretty cute, but he claims she’s stone deaf.”

“Cool,” Chester said. “I mean, it’s not like midget sex or amputee sex, but it’s pretty far out. And just think – she’ll never hear you warn her so you can cum anywhere you like.”

“That’s sick.”

“Oh, like you didn’t know that about me? Listen, man, do you want to give me a phone number for your next of kin? How do you know this guy’s telling you the truth? He could be a serial killer.”

“I’m suspicious too. He offered to bring her to the diner down the street. I’m going to meet them there. He suggested it, and it made sense to me. At least I’ll get to see if the girl is real and check out the situation.”

“When are you supposed to meet them?”

“In about half an hour.”

“Be smart. Get there before they do. That way, you’ll see if they come alone, or if they bring goons with them.”

“Good idea.”

I was sipping a cup of coffee at the diner when Nate walked in with a very pretty girl with shoulder length light brown hair. They stood at the door getting their bearings, and then Nate saw me. I waved, and he touched the girl on the arm and pointed my way. She smiled, and they walked toward me.

When they got to my booth, Nate did something with his hands where the girl could see them and said to me, “Sam, this is my sister Beth. She cut her hair shortly after those beach pictures were taken and dyed it back to its natural color.” Turning to the girl, he said, “Beth, this is Sam, the man I told you about.”

“Hello, Sam. Nate didn’t tell me how handsome you are,” she said, holding out her hand.

I took it, and said to her brother, “How do I talk to her? I don’t know sign language.”

“Beth reads lips. Just make sure you look at her when you talk, and don’t hold your hand in front of your mouth or anything. If she’s not looking at you, touch her to get her attention.”

“Okay.” Turning to Beth, I said, “I … am … very … glad … to … meet … you … too.”

She grinned. “Talk normally. You’re one of the easy ones. You move your lips a lot. I bet your speech is very clear. I can probably keep up. If I can’t, I’ll let you know.”

Interesting. She wasn’t hard to understand. Her voice was a little flat, and some of the vowel sounds were off, like an accent, but her speech was clear. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had a conversation with someone with hearing problems.”

“I don’t have hearing problems. I’m deaf. Sound is something I can sometimes feel, like a bass drum or a door slamming, but I don’t experience what you think of as hearing.”

Signing rapidly, Nate said, “Our parents took her everywhere when she was a kid, trying to find some miracle-worker. It’s a birth defect. She never developed some parts of her hearing system.”

“Why are you signing if she lip-reads?”

“Because I’m looking at you, not her. I don’t know if she can read my lips from this angle, and I want her to know what I say.”

The waitress came to take our orders. Nate touched Beth’s hand to get her attention, since she was reading the menu. Turning to face her, he asked, “Are you ready to order?”

“Oh, sure.” She glanced up at the waitress and saw her looking back at her, pen in hand. She gave her order and watched as the waitress scribbled.

The woman seemed to have no trouble understanding, simply nodding as she wrote. Beth’s speech was pretty remarkable, if the story was true about her deafness. I still didn’t know what was going on. If these kids were playing me, they were good at it.

“Sam?” Beth said.