Victory Lap

"Ah-chewww!"

"Ohgod, why now?" she thought, quaking inside the gray metal
locker in the long-unused trainer's room beneath the boy's gym
and a short step across the hall from the football team's
dressing room. "Why couldn't I have held that fucking sneeze.
Maybe they won't notice," Tory prayed to herself for the first
time in ages.

It was not that this 16-year-old had any evil intentions in her
lurking, but Tory just could not convince her boyfriend, Victor,
the starting tight end, to give her a tour of a zone forbidden to
all women, even moms -- the boy's locker room.

Locker rooms are sacrosanct in sports. Signs on the wall remind
players, "What is Said Here Stays Here," and why anybody with an
ounce of character would WANT to spend two seconds in such a
smelly, dank, dark, metallic dungeon dedicated to twisting young
men's minds is not really the question. Tory had an insatiable
curiosity about what the boy's locker room looked like; well,
really a healthy and, now, dangerous curiosity about what a young
man's naked body looked like.

But Victor would never betray the code of machismo, and despite
his evident fondness for the virginal Tory, he put his foot down,
hard, on her request for a surreptitious survey of such a
masculine domain. He was right, she thought, while hiding out --
splintered pine benches, rusty metal lockers, the stink of
liniment, generations of sweat, water pooling on the floor of the
toilet area. One big yuck!

And just as Tory decided her daring had been erring, she sneezed.

The calliope-chorus of towel-snapping, deep-throated
"Fuuuuuccckk"s and antler-butting exercises rumbled to a musical
retard. Then silence. Then a querulous volley of "huh"s and
"wha'satts?"

It took the detective work and brains of center Rob Butler to
make out that it was a sneeze they heard. And a girl's sneeze at
that. Her tell-tale heart was going to give her away, and in less
time than it takes for a referee to whistle dead an about-to-be 
fumble, Rob plucked the 5-foot-2 minx out of the locker and held
her like a cat, by the scruff of her sweatshirt.

"Lookee here!" he exulted, not knowing whether to put her down or
drop her on the doorstep of his coach's back porch like a pup
with prey. "A spy! A snitch! A Peeping Tom... Thomasina!!"

Tory could barely breathe, afraid that she would be pummeled to
mush by this state champion high school football team. Or worse!
"No," she thought. "They wouldn't do anything like THAT! If they
really raped me, they'd probably have to sit out a whole
game!"

As Tory tried to figure a way out of this horritude -- a task no
less daunting for her than for a Nobel laureate to unscramble and
re-assemble DNA molecules -- Victor entered the locker room,
having been delayed at the end of practice by taking three
voluntary laps.

"Put her down!" the team captain commanded, and Tory, ever-so-
grateful, ran directly into his arms.

Quickly, to the jeers and grotesque cackling of his teammates, he
hustled the flaxen-haired waif outside to the patio overlooking
the bleachers and the gridiron. Holding her a little too firmly
by the shoulders, he whispered angrily into her ear: "How could
you do this to me, Tory! I told you never to set foot in there!"

Her eyes, one green and one brown, welled up, but the tears were
only the color of shame.

"This is so damn embarrassing," Victor hissed at her. "How can I
live this down!"

Tory shook and tried to speak. But only the lame squeak of
"sorry" emerged from her quivering throat. "Jesus H. Christ," he
went on. "Can't you understand anything!"

"Buuuttttt Viiiictorrrr!" she started again. "You wouldn't take
me in there when we were ever alone," Tory sobbed in a pitiful
vibrato. "And I was just, just ccccuurrrrrious."

He let go of her and stepped back. "You know what happened to the
curious cat," he remonstrated. Now she was afraid that in his
backward movement she was going to lose him forever, all because
of this stupid stunt.

But then Tory, in a burst of recognition of the obvious, talked
back to her beloved weekend warrior. "Wait a minute! You keep,
keeep, aaaassssking mmmmm-eeeeee how would YOU live this down.
What - What - What about ME!" 

Victor, after a few seconds of thought deep enough to fry onion
rings, replied, "You brought it on yourself ... sweetie." Ah, she
sighed silently. "Sweetie." His word of affection so common in
days past was now a promise -- of some kind.

"But I suppose I'll just have to take some shit for a few days.
And if anybody says anything about you after tomorrow, well, I
guess I'll just have to bust him." He sneered crookedly, trying
to comfort her but at the same time indicate displeasure and
chivalry.

"Oh, Victor. I was such a dunce for hiding out like that. Please
don't hate me for it."

"I can't HATE you, sweetie,(There! he said it AGAIN) but I'm not
letting you off so easily." With her face a puzzle of confusion,
Tory found herself being hustled rapidly by the elbows toward the
bleachers and marched down the concrete stairs, her boyfriend
lecturing her all the way. She couldn't remember it all, but some
words stood out: "ridiculous" ... "obscene" ... "humiliating" ...
"childish" ... "bad" ... "grrrrrrooooossssssss."

"What are you doing, Vic?" she cried out as he finally scooped
her into his muscled forearms like a fireman carrying an infant
from a burning building.

His reply sent a shiver of terror down her spine. "Your parents
are such wusses. You never learned ANY lessons, did you?" he
accused. "Well, I am going to teach you a lesson, right now,
young lady! Vic announced, turning his head over his shoulder to
take note of the entire squad standing at the top of the
bleachers cheering him on.

"I am going to give you the spanking you deserve, Tory! As she
screeched in futile protest, Vic grabbed the Gatorade® cooler
from the bench and hauled both the orange bucket and his red-
faced prey toward the field of his dreams.

She emitted another tiny squeal of protest, but the sinews of his
forearms, the tan sculptures of his biceps told her that flight
would be futile. And how, her subconscious screamed in joy, she
loved being held so tightly, sniffing the aroma of mud and sweat
from the front of his practice jersey, cut off at midriff.

"A spanking?" she whined, not really protesting and no longer
repressing her age-old fantasy of such a moment. "Oh, Vic. I was
so rotten to you. But not out here!"

"Yes, out here!" he growled back. "You invaded our locker room.
THIS is where you belong right now!" She had not yet noticed, but
Victor was close to fulfilling every boy's dream, too. He had her
at the 50 yard line at dusk, ready to have his way.

Vic was a straight arrow, pretty much, and was (truth be told) a
virgin, too. And the thought of being suspended for the big game
next week for taking real liberties with Tory kept him from
considering any action too untoward.

Directly at midfield, the 6-foot-3 220-pound tight end plunked
down the cooler, sat down hard on it and pulled the helpless Tory
right across his bare knees below the cutoff of his practice
shorts. He had never done this before, but with everyone watching
from the top of the bleachers, he knew he had to give the
performance of his life.

Tory was so ashamed of her treachery and so enthralled by her
boyfriend's take-charge attitude that she did not resist much,
even when he sprawled her across his lap and hoisted her navy
pleated skirt.

But when Vic began yanking her cotton panties down, to the
whistles and stomping of his teammates above, she screamed,
"Nooooooo!!! Her little legs flailed so much that Vic had no
trouble flicking the panties off her ankles and flinging them in
an arc toward the goalposts.

Neither of them had seen each other naked before, and Victor was
not going to be denied this small pleasure one bit. Tory,
however, was as mortified as a bishop in a bathhouse. Well,
slightly more mortified.

The girl's pale backside seemed to brighten the twilight fog.
Victor raised his meaty right palm -- luckily he had removed the
Stickum ® before practice ended -- and smacked Tory's pert round
ass hard. She howled in surprise, though the sting rippled a glow
-- she would later liken it to cognac -- through her loins. SMACK
SMACK SMACK he pounded her bouncing bottom.

Tory was starting to cry in shame, and, now, in pain. But with
her legs splayed and her skirt halfway up her back, all she could
do was submit. WHACK CRACK SPANK SPANK SLAP SMACK!

The boys on the hill were jumping and hugging as if each one had
won the Super Bowl by himself. And in a way, it WAS the Super
Bowl -- of hormonal proportions. "First and 10, do it again!" one
of them started chanting. Another, shouted, "Hit er again, hit er
again, harder HARDER!"

Tory, however, had lost all consciousness of the audience, and
felt only Victor's strong punishing hand fanning the cool evening
air across her blazing mounds milliseconds before each slap
resounded in the near-empty stadium. Her writhing from the pain
twisted inexorably into a bump and grind of ecstasy. Tears were
plinking into the soft grass of midfield, but Tory was as near to
heaven as a 16-year-old without a BMW could imagine.

Only because his hamstrings were tightening under the pressure of his
wriggling, writhing girlfriend did Vic let up. Tory rolled helplessly from
his lap to the turf, looking up at him wide-eyed with shame and passion.
Victor looked down and for the first time laid his eyes on what he had so
long coveted.

It was not, as he sometimes thought, just a neat slit dividing
Barbie Doll® legs. Curly tufts of straw colored hair clumped atop
a uniquely structured pouch of flesh; vertical folds and rivulets
of pastry-like tissue reminded him of an ignition for which he
hoped he had the only key; swollen lips glistening in the dusk
slunk downward toward babyflesh where she would be sitting so
gingerly tomorrow.

Victor was flying with her to heaven and so did not notice that
Tory had managed to slip his shorts down and pry from his cup a
marvelous toy of her own. She saw its variety of shapes and felt
this living breathing organ expand from spongy to tensile to
chisel rigid. She giggled to herself as she saw in Vic's singular
manhood the array of different-sized utensils in her dad's
toolbox.

They stroked and strummed a lapdance that would have made Dr.
Elders proud. At the precise moment Victor was to launch himself
toward glory, Rob Butler above had switched on the stadium
lights. In the brilliant blinding glare, Vic's fountain of
desire, Tory's feather pillow of pleasure, dissolved into
ephemera.

She blinked as she heard Victor clack his spikes against the
concrete locker room floor and said a little prayer that she had
been able to stifle that sneeze.