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Subject: {ASSM} My Reward Ch27 (MC, no sex, young love, rom, baseball)
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CHAPTER 27: SECOND CHILDHOOD -- THE BALL GAME

The other thing of interest that happened that winter was that I took a 
trip into my own past.

My fascination with Cassie's young body, and watching the fun Beth had 
been having by playing around with her high school crush, made me want 
to revisit my own childhood and see what I had missed when I had been 
too shy to even try to kiss a girl.

So I took a trip back to eighth grade, when I had fallen in love with 
Karen Waner.

It was a slow Tuesday in March, and I had just come out of a meeting 
(couldn't avoid them all) with Michelle to plan the new offices - we 
were moving to a new building where, because we had grown so large, we 
would be the primary tenants. 

The biggest problem the agency faced then, it seemed, was finding enough 
desks for all the new employees. Paying them was no problem - potential 
clients were standing in line for our services despite our quite 
outrageous fee structure. Which wasn't surprising, since our creative 
won all the prizes at the multitude of award shows and our clients had 
huge sales increases almost immediately whenever a new campaign was 
rolled out.

The partners were all doing quite well - Michelle had just bought a new 
house out in Paradise Valley, and everybody had upgraded their cars at 
least to Infinitis and Lexi, if not to Porsches. Chris was bugging me to 
buy a new house -- she was contemplating Camelback Mountain -- but I was 
resisting. I had won a temporary reprieve by having a basement dug 
(basements are rare in Phoenix), which added another 2500 square feet 
for a new family room and a play area with a pool table, foosball, air 
hockey, etc. She had received a Lexus as part of the bribe - and now 
Sarah was pushing for one.  On that I put my foot down.

So all was going well - prosperity reigned and happiness (for the most 
part) abounded. Chris actually deigned to let me slip my dick in her 
once every few weeks, though she wouldn't go so far as to move while 
doing so.

Anyway, on this particular Tuesday, having just come out of a meeting to 
plan the new offices, and having just received an outstanding blowjob 
from my new assistant, Wendy (Sharon had gone back to being a full-time 
wife and mother), I was not contemplating the few dark spots in my life 
- my concentration was fully focussed on how well most things were 
going. One might almost say I was a bit smug at the moment.

Which led me to think that it was a bit of a shame that my whole life 
hadn't been so nice. Not that I had been disadvantaged. I had grown up 
in a middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhood in north Phoenix. My 
parents were nice people who had given us kids everything we needed and 
much of what we wanted. But it was an ordinary childhood. What, I 
wondered, if it had been like the rather extraordinary life I was 
leading now?

Only one way to find out, I decided. I told Reward to turn back the 
clock to mid-April of my eighth grade year. Ike was nearing the end of 
his term and all, most of us felt, was pretty much right with the world. 
The only problem, as far as fourteen-year-old Tommy Mallory was 
concerned, was that his dick was sore from jacking off while 
contemplating the many perfections of Karen Waner. 

Well, that wasn't the only problem. In addition, he was small and skinny 
and falling behind most of the other boys in athletic skills -- athletic 
skills, in that social set, referring almost exclusively to baseball. 
Tommy was a moderately good baseball player (about as good at baseball 
as Thomas Mallory would one day be at soccer) who was just not keeping 
pace physically as the other boys grew and developed bigger muscles and 
better coordination. This development would come, of course, though 
Tommy didn't realize that. In any case, from his point of view, 
development that came late was of no solace at all.

In Little League baseball, then as now, the kids who develop earliest 
are made into pitchers, where their relative speed overwhelms the 
smaller kids. Tommy, never a particularly good hitter, had sunk to the 
level that his teammates expected little when he got to bat, and a few 
made derisive comments occasionally. The few hits he got were bloopers 
to right - since he almost invariably swung behind the pitch. Only 
because of his fielding ability did he continue to play regularly as a 
shortstop for the Indians, a team in the St. Thomas Aquinas Little 
League. 

So that was the situation I faced as I got up that April Friday morning 
to get ready to go to school. In order to determine how sweet 
adolescence could have been, I simply needed to get into Karen Waner's 
pants and straighten out the baseball situation.

I damn near called the whole thing off when my mother poked her head in 
to wake me at seven-thirty. Both my parents had died a few years 
previous, and seeing my mother as a younger woman, alive and vital, was 
painful. When I arrived in the kitchen where my father was preparing to 
leave for work, I was again ready to quit this game - but I decided to 
carry on a little further, perhaps avoiding my parents as much as 
possible.

I think my parents were a little surprised that I had gotten out of bed 
on the first call and had arrived promptly in the kitchen without 
fighting with my sisters. I realized I would have to be careful about 
not showing too much maturity for a fourteen-year-old. 

My father had a few questions about school and my baseball team. Talking 
to him was painful, though, so I kept my answers short and concentrated 
on the sports page. He apparently felt such behavior was in line with 
what was to be expected of me, and let it pass. I ate as quickly as 
possible and headed off to school.

The classroom was pretty much as I remembered it, long rows of desks 
with narrow aisles. Those were the days when a class of 55 pupils, such 
as this one, was not unusual in Catholic schools. Green chalkboards on 
two walls. A corkboard with something about April showers bringing May 
flowers pinned to it.

Surveying the room brought more poignant thoughts. Two aisles over sat 
Dan Leppert, a teammate on the Indians, though not a particularly close 
friend. He would join ROTC in college and die at twenty-three as a 
platoon leader in Vietnam. Mary Callahan, a pretty though mousy brunette 
who sat next to him, would go through three marriages and live, mostly 
drunk, in a trailer park in Glendale.

Larry Ciambrocco, a friendly, chubby kid sitting in front of Mary, would 
become a grossly fat insurance agent. And in front of him sat Linda Fox, 
teacher's pet because she planned on becoming a nun. She would briefly 
achieve her ambition, be assigned to missionary work in Guatemala, 
become radicalized, and eventually bear arms for a Marxist guerilla 
movement and two babies for its leader. He would dump her, accusing her 
of treason, to take on a younger, fresher comrade. Linda, when last 
heard of, was running a women's center in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and 
living in a lesbian commune with three other former nuns.

But my attention was focussed mostly on the desk immediately in front of 
mine, because there sat, or would soon be sitting, the object of my 
fascination, Karen Waner.

I hadn't seen Karen since high school, but as she came down our row to 
her desk, hugging her books to her chest, smiling at friends as she 
passed, I realized that I had had excellent taste even at fourteen.

Karen was something of a pixie. She was rather short (though only a 
little shorter than me -- I was about 5-2, she was probably 5-0), and 
slender, though with enough of a figure that it showed through the 
loose-fitting blue jumper the girls wore as a uniform. Her face was 
round, with sparkling, slightly devilish, gray eyes set wide with a 
small nose, slightly uptilted at the end, between. Her hair was light 
brown, with bangs cut just above her eyebrows, and curls that spun 
outward at her neck.

To me, in those days, she was the most beautiful thing on earth, and 
even today I see her as darned good-looking -- though cute would 
probably be a more appropriate word than beautiful.

More than her looks though, it was her personality that appealed to me. 
Really. Though perfectly well-behaved in that almost-prim manner 
required of Catholic school girls in those days (I knew for a fact that 
she got an "A" in Conduct every quarter), she was fun to be around. She 
would laugh (or at least giggle) at boys' puerile jokes, rather than go 
running to the nun, and sometimes she might even make her own puerile 
jokes. 

She was also a good athlete (though not a jock -- that was definitely 
frowned on in those days), who played on the girls' softball team and 
could discuss baseball intelligently with the boys.

I had had Reward analyze her feelings toward me. He reported back that 
she had a bit of a crush on me, was aware through the grapevine (and, no 
doubt, by my lost-calf expression whenever around her) that I had a big 
crush on her, and was wondering when I was going to do something about 
it.  Her idea of doing something about it was perhaps a try at a kiss, 
though holding hands would do for the moment. I had a bit more in mind.

She smiled shyly at me as she reached her desk and began to put her 
books in the compartment below the seat, modestly arranging her skirt as 
she squatted in the aisle. I smiled back and asked her if she was coming 
to the game that night, noting that we were playing the Pirates. She 
said she didn't know.

"I really hope you do," I said, almost brazenly forward by my standards 
-- I could see she was a little surprised. "It's going to be a really 
good game."

She smiled again, and I nearly melted. "Yeah, I'll probably be there," 
she said, turning to face the front as the bell rang and we stood to say 
our morning prayers.

I floated through the morning on the strength of that smile. At lunch, I 
had Reward arrange for an empty seat between Karen (sitting at the edge 
of a group of girls) and a group of boys. A boy sitting amongst the 
girls was simply not done - but it was acceptable to take a seat on the 
border.

As I sat, Karen looked up in surprise - this was another rather 
astonishingly bold move for Tommy Mallory. She also looked pleased and 
smiled shyly. Two girls across from her giggled.

We conversed through the short lunch period. Standard practice was to 
wolf down the swill as quickly as possible in order to maximize the time 
available for playing. We also operated on the principle that the less 
time the food remained in our mouths, the less opportunity it had to 
assault our taste buds.

The conversation, abbreviated as it was, covered a variety of topics 
vital to our lives, including baseball (of course), a couple mutual 
enemies, and the difficulty of reading the nun's tiny, spidery 
handwriting on the board from our desks in the back of the room. 

By the time we were finished eating I was even more certain that Karen 
Waner was the love of my life (year fourteen model). During the lunch, I 
had had Reward search her mind and take out all of the fears and 
repressions about sex (this was pre-pill, and pregnancy was the number 
one fear). When he reported back, he also informed me that I was scoring 
big with her. An extra dash or two of hormones and an occasional tickle 
on her clitoris, he suggested, should guarantee success this evening. 

I approved the plan, and saw Karen's face flush -- possibly from the 
hormones, possibly from the ideas the itch in her crotch had suggested 
to her. As we arose to carry our plates to the kitchen, she mentioned 
that her parents were going shopping that evening and taking her brother 
with them. "If I come to the game, I'll have to walk home alone," she 
told me. "It's always so scary going into an empty house," she 
concluded, "I want to come to the game, but only if you'll promise to 
walk home with me afterwards."

I had little difficulty agreeing to those terms, and we parted, Karen 
joining a couple other girls near the door (they immediately began 
questioning her), and me following a few steps behind.

To actually leave the lunchroom together with Karen would have been 
impossible -- it would have meant passing together directly in front of 
the hard-eyed nun in charge of watching the section of the cafeteria by 
the door. Reliable sources reported that prior to entering the convent, 
she had spent several years as a guard at the state prison. I would 
never consider walking past her with a girl, even with Reward's help.

The afternoon passed quickly -- I got one beautiful, even proud, smile 
from Karen when I correctly answered a difficult question in history and 
even added a few additional comments. Actually, I had had to bite my 
tongue, since I had been about to question our textbook's interpretation 
of the causes of the Great Depression -- which put way too much emphasis 
on the stock market, and barely mentioned in passing the Smoot-Hawley 
Tariff. I realized at the last moment, however, that such discussion 
might seem out of place in an eighth grade classroom.

As we were walking out of schoolyard at the end of the day, I noticed 
Karen walking rather slowly (very slowly, in fact) in front of me. I 
hurried to catch up, as of course she had intended. She smiled as she 
saw me beside her, and we picked up our conversation where we had left 
off at lunch. 

When we were around the corner from the school, where the nuns could no 
longer see us, Karen casually brushed her hand against mine. I took the 
hint and her hand. This first contact flustered her for a few seconds, 
but then she managed to ask something about homework. I answered as best 
I could with my whole consciousness concentrated on my hand.

I briefly considered moving the seduction schedule up a bit, like to 
immediately, but decided not to. A bit of a make-out session might be in 
order, though.

Just before we reached Karen's house (mine was another street over), I 
had Reward add a high oleander hedge in front of a neighbor's house. I 
led a wondering but not protesting Karen behind the hedge and put my 
arms around her waist.

Again she was surprised, but pleased, by this newly-aggressive Tommy 
Mallory. She smiled at me, then closed her eyes expectantly as I leaned 
forward and placed the first "real" kiss of my life on her waiting lips.

Although it wasn't much of a kiss, little more than a momentary brushing 
of the lips, it thrilled both of us. Karen sighed and pressed herself 
against me, folding herself into my embrace and resting her head on my 
shoulder. We stood stationary for what seemed a long time, then Karen 
took her head off my shoulder and kissed me.

This kiss was as light as the first, because nice girls like Karen could 
never take the initiative. But I took it as a signal that she wanted 
more, so I returned the kiss with slightly more pressure and gently 
lowered us both to the cool shady grass.

Hidden from the street by the oleanders and from the house by a group of 
bushes Reward had thoughtfully added (he showed real potential as a 
landscape architect), Karen could feel comfortable that we would not be 
seen and did not resist as we dropped to the ground.

We sat side-by-side, my arm around her waist, Karen leaning against me 
as I leaned against a tree. She turned to me and again offered her lips. 
As we kissed, she turned her body slightly, to make it easy for my right 
hand to slide to her side and then slowly upward to the small swell of 
her breast.

As my hand touched the side of her breast the feeling was electric, even 
with multiple layers of clothing intervening. Karen leaned forward, 
pressing her lips more tightly to mine, and twisting her breast more 
into my hand. Emboldened, I cupped the breast fully and caressed it 
lightly, drawing a shudder of pleasure from Karen.

My hand on her breast pushing her backward gently, I lowered her to the 
cool grass without breaking our kiss. As she lay back, her hair spread 
around her like a halo, I kissed her more strongly and tentatively 
pressed my tongue between her lips. Slowly her lips opened to accept me 
in, as my hand began squeezing her tender young breast. Her hand snaked 
up to the back of my head and pulled me down more tightly. 

Finally she broke away from the kiss, twisting her head, saying, "Oh 
Tommy, we can't," followed almost immediately by, "Ohhh, it feels so 
good." Then she kissed me again as my hand slipped up under her blouse. 
Catholic schoolgirls of that time wore full slips under their blouses, 
so I was still two layers of clothing from heaven.

I knew there was no way I was going to get to her bare breast now -- it 
would require almost totally undressing her, which would be pushing her 
way too far, too fast. But the simple act of getting beneath her blouse 
excited her (and me). Her breathing quickened and she tightened her grip 
on my head.

Again she said, "Tommy, we can't," but made no move to stop me as my 
hand again cupped her breast and squeezed.

As we continued to kiss, my hand slowly moved downward, then trailed 
down her long skirt to her knee. As it touched her flesh just above her 
knee, Karen sucked in her breath sharply, but didn't object and returned 
to kissing me as I began to move slowly up her thigh.

My hand tenderly caressed her thigh, first on the outside as it traveled 
up to her hip, then, after reaching the nylon of her panties and gently 
touching her soft buttcheeks, slowly moving across to the inside of the 
thigh. She moaned softly as my hand neared her crotch, and then 
whispered "Oh yes," as my finger touched her slit through the soft (and 
wet) nylon.

I stroked up and down her slit for a while as she purred with pleasure. 
At that moment, though, a door slammed and a woman walked out of the 
house. She didn't see us, of course, but Karen cowered back behind the 
tree until she got in her car and drove away. 

Karen giggled nervously as the housewife drove off, then kissed me 
quickly, straightened her skirt, tucked her blouse back in, and gathered 
up her books. I tried to prolong the kiss, but she said, "Not now, 
Tommy. Not here."

This time she meant it, I knew, but I also knew that "not now" meant 
later, and "not here" meant somewhere. The moment was gone, of course, 
which was just as well, since I had been about to lose control, as had 
Karen. Tonight would be better, and Karen would have several hours to 
think about what she held felt in the past few minutes.

As we stood up, I took her hand and as we walked on toward her house I 
quickly leaned over and kissed her cheek. 

"I love you, Karen," I said softly.

She smiled at me. "I love you, Tommy."

*     *     *

The stands were full of excited fans.

Well, they were full, anyway. Though admittedly that wasn't saying much 
-- they only held about fifty people. This was enough for the parents, 
and the kids preferred to stand around in groups and kibbitz.

The game promised to be a good one -- the Indians and Pirates were the 
two best teams in the league. Which again wasn't saying much, since 
there were only four teams. We had played once before, the Pirates 
winning as their star pitcher pretty well shut us down. The Pirates 
though had lost to another team on a night when the star was missing, so 
we were tied for the league lead. The consensus among knowledgeable 
observers was that the Pirates would be back in the lead after this game 
and coast on to the league championship.

The game started off according to form, with the Pirates, whose only 
weakness was a lack of power, scraping out a run in each of the first 
two innings off a collection of scratch singles, a couple walks, and 
some sloppy Indian fielding. 

Meanwhile, the Indians were set down 1-2-3 in the first, as the Pirate 
stud totally overpowered us. In the bottom of the second, he began to 
show his periodic wildness (which was part of what made him so scary) by 
walking one batter and hitting another. Then he settled down and struck 
out the next two.

Everyone in the park felt that he had worked his way out of the jam, 
since he was facing the Indians' number eight batter, their weak-hitting 
shortstop, Tommy Mallory.

I could feel if not hear the groans of my teammates, seeing a potential 
rally slip away as I entered the batter's box.
 
I stepped to the plate, looking over toward the cluster of girls on the 
first base side where Karen stood with her friends. She had momentarily 
stopped gossiping with them to concentrate her attention on the game. 
Or, more to the point, on me.

I took the first two pitches. The first a ball, high and wide, the 
second a called strike that I felt was clearly low. Another call like 
that, I figured, and I'd have Reward take over the umpiring.

The third one I told Reward to groove for me and to slow it down to my 
speed (very slow). It floated over the plate like a fat, lazy balloon 
and I teed off on it, driving it into the left center alley. With two 
out, the runners were of course running as soon as I hit it and both 
scored easily to tie the game. I made second standing up, shocking the 
Indians, I suspect, as much as the Pirates -- it was my first extra-base 
hit of the season, raising my average to .243. 

I looked over at Karen and saw something that pride, approaching 
hero-worship, in her eyes. It was a look I wanted to see more of. The 
next batter, the only person in the starting line-up worse than me, 
struck out feebly on three pitches, stranding me on second. My teammates 
greeted me warmly after the inning, though, one of them carrying my 
glove out to me.

In the third, perhaps buoyed by being unexpectedly back into a game that 
appeared to be slipping away, we put the Pirates down in order. 
Unfortunately, they did the same to us, and in the fourth, we took a 
pounding, as the Pirates batted around and scored four runs.

Our bench was pretty dispirited as we sat down. We were down 6-2 and 
nobody had ever scored more than three runs against this pitcher.

But again I came to the plate with two out and two on, the result of a 
walk and a throwing error on an easy grounder that should have ended the 
inning. My teammates, I sensed, were ambivalent. I'd come through the 
last time, the optimists in them argued, but their more realistic sides 
countered that it had probably been a fluke. 

Again I looked over at Karen as I stepped into the box. She was staring 
at me with total concentration, completely ignoring her friends, who 
chattered behind her.

The first pitch was low, well below my knees, but called a strike -- the 
ump was beginning to annoy me. But I put him out of my mind as I told 
Reward to give me another fat one. He did, I swung, and this time, aided 
by Reward, the ball carried over the fence in left for a three-run 
homer.

There was a palpable pause before the cheering began. Understandable, 
because nobody believed what they had seen. Our field had been 
constructed for the high school team, with fences much too deep for 
eighth graders. Home runs were an extreme rarity in our league -- maybe 
half a dozen per season. A home run by a skinny little shortstop? 
Impossible.

Once the cheering started though, it was loud and long. People actually 
stood up and yelled -- even many of the Pirates' parents. As I circled 
the bases, loving every second of it, I looked over at Karen, who was 
literally jumping up and down and shaking her friends to get their 
attention on what her boyfriend had done. When I touched the plate I was 
mobbed by my teammates, now believers all.

The Pirates again seemed to be stunned by my hit, and went down meekly 
in the fifth. We did the same, getting one runner on another walk, but 
stranding him.

So we went into the final inning trailing 6-5. The Indians were feeling 
hopeful, though certainly not confident. Everybody knew, though, that we 
didn't dare fall any farther behind.

The inning started well, as the first Pirate batter popped up softly to 
third. Then we got into trouble. Dan Leppert, who was pitching, got a 
couple bad calls on close pitches (the ump was asking for a 
Reward-induced case of hemorrhoids, I felt), walked the second batter, 
then got rattled and started throwing wildly. The next two batters also 
walked, filling the bases, before our coach brought in our relief 
pitcher.

It was a bad spot -- a walk scored a run, a fly probably scored a run, 
even a grounder might score a run. As for a hit -- we didn't even want 
to think about it. And the Pirates' best hitter was coming up.

I glanced at the crowd. Everybody, even the girls along the first-base 
line, was watching closely. Karen was rapt, her hands partially covering 
her eyes, afraid to watch, afraid not to.

The batter was a lefty, so I moved a few steps closer to second. Then I 
gave Reward his instructions.

The batter swung at the first pitch and sent a screaming low liner back 
over the mound, almost taking the pitcher's foot off. It was a sure hit, 
everyone knew -- two runs, maybe three.

Except that I had moved over toward second base and had taken off with 
the swing. The ball struck the ground just behind the pitcher, then 
bounded waist high over second. I neared second at the same time, 
stretched my glove out to field it, stepped on second, and threw a 
strike to first to double the batter, who was barely halfway down the 
line.

Double plays were a rarity in little league, and this one involved a big 
reversal of fortune, from several runs for the Pirates to no runs, 
Indians at bat. The audience took a moment to realize what had happened 
before standing to applaud. Karen was in an ecstasy of hero-worship.

The Indians were excited, too. Still behind 6-5, but they were believers 
-- they knew that if they could just get their new star to the plate, 
all would be well.

I was fourth in the order that inning though, and the first two struck 
out and popped out, as the Pirate's big pitcher put everything he had 
into his pitches. As I stood in the on-deck circle and watched our third 
batter get behind 0-2, I told Reward to fix things quickly. He did it 
the easy way, though not easy on the batter. The next pitch was a 
fastball that hit him in the butt.

As he trotted down to first, trying to rub his sore ass without being 
too obvious about it, all eyes were on the confrontation of the Pirate's 
star pitcher and the Indian's star hitter. This is the way games are 
supposed to end, each team's main man facing each other with the game 
riding on every pitch.

I decided to milk the drama a bit, working the count to 3-2 (one of the 
strikes was definitely low), then fouling off two pitches, one a 
screaming liner down third that made a booming sound as it struck the 
wooden fence just off the foul line.

That was enough drama, I figured, and told Reward to make the next pitch 
the big one. It floated in, I creamed it, and it sailed high over 
straightaway center, clearing the fence by a good twenty feet.

The Pirates just stared dumbfounded at the fence as I trotted the bases 
to the music of delirious cheering. None of the other eight Indians had 
gotten a hit, but the Pirates had lost on the seven RBIs of . . . of . . 
. Tommy Mallory, forgodsake.

I probably should have felt sorry for them, but I was enjoying too much 
the moment that I'd never had before -- the moment of being the sports 
hero, the moment of being cheered by a huge (by our standards) crowd. 
The whole team met me at the plate and carried me to the bench, shouting 
with joy. And Karen and her friends had hurried over to stand behind the 
bench, Karen looking at me with . . . it was now beyond hero-worship, it 
approached adoration.

The next ten or fifteen minutes in my memory are a confused melange of 
cheers, congratulations, backslapping, and general exuberance. The 
important thing was that, after I had gotten my after-game coke from the 
concession stand, Karen was waiting near the gate to be walked home -- 
to the house with no parents.

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