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.