© Sauce*Box, Fall 1996. All rights revert to author.

shunnamitistic
by Jemiah Jefferson

When I was fifteen, we merely talked.

After ten solid minutes of silence, the darjeeling steeping in the pot, Rowan Leigh stretched himself in the wicker chair like a cat, then leaned forward and poured tea into the china cup before me. "Have you ever had your toes sucked?"

Me -- flustered -- previously he had asked me in a bored voice about school, about Connecticut, about what I thought about England. "What?" I said.

"You heard me. Sugar?"

"Oh... uh... yes..."

Leigh pushed the sugar bowl towards me with his little finger. His hands were small and muscular, the fingertips completely uncallused. He watched me intently as I dropped an irregular lump of sugar into the dark tea. "Well?" he insisted. "I need an answer."

"I uh... well, no."

"It's very pleasurable. Cream, as well? You'll find it improves the flavor. Though I bet you being a junior Yalie, you'll have drunk English tea before. Am I right?" The cream pitcher approached me. "I have a wonderful association with toe sucking."

My hand shook and spilled the cream into the saucer.

"It was 1972, and I was in Morocco," Leigh continued, slouching back into the wicker chair, "and the friend I had come with got me very high on the finest hashish there was in all of North Africa -- that day. He hired a young beautiful dark-skinned girl to come in and suck my toes -- no sex, no kissing, just the toes. Then he and a group of men burst in, put a silk pillowcase over my head, and dragged me out of there, kidnap-style, and brought me to a very dark place where I could hear the cries and jingle-bells of the marketplace. The pillowcase was taken off my head so I could breathe, and then, in the incredible close brown darkness, men proceeded to fuck me, one right after the other. I have no idea who they were or how many there were -- at least three, probably more. I couldn't tell. It was ever so T.E. Lawrence." Leigh laughed at my expression, which must have been priceless. "Drink your tea, my dear, before it gets cold."

"But -- you enjoyed this?"

"Oh of course I did. I was too intoxicated not to. I was a bit scared, but it was the sort of set-up my friend was likely to put over on me. My dear friend, the next day, smiled and treated me to a massage and some opiated wine. I bought him a set of silver candlesticks to thank him -- I think I sent a card that said 'Fuck yourself in the arse with these'."

"Oh, my God."

"You're laughing, my dear."

I shook my head. "It's just so odd... you're married with a child... I never thought you were gay."

"Who's gay? There's much more to being gay than taking it up the arse from a bunch of sweet, oily Moroccan boys when you're stoned beyond belief. I believe the scientific term for it is 'bisexual'. I simply believe in pleasure, in all of its forms, never shying away from anything pleasurable because of some obscure morality."

"I'm sorry."

"No offense taken. You're young. It's part of your charm, your naivete. I shall take great pleasure in watching it slowly wear away."

When Leigh's wife, Elisabeth, came home at six to take me back to the dormitory, she noted my tension. "You're all bunched up in your seat, Ada," she mentioned. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing." She didn't pry, and after a few seconds, I supplemented my denial with, "It's just that your husband... he's so..."

Elisabeth laughed so hard she nearly ran us off the road. "Oh," she said. "Oh yes. Perhaps I should have warned you. I wasn't sure how he was going to be; I didn't want to alarm you unnecessarily if he was going to be a gentleman this time. I should have known. Okay.

"Don't let him rattle you. He's really harmless. Always remember that he simply enjoys a reaction; he likes to say the most outrageous things just so he can watch the blood rush to your face. If he ever does anything to make you angry, let him know right away. You mustn't be intimidated by him; he may be a celebrated poet and a brilliant mind and all that, but I'll still spank his little botty if he does anything to seriously upset you. I've lost more governesses that way."

"I don't know." I shrugged. "I mean, he's not that bad."

"No, he isn't. Hang in there. I have such good feelings about you, Ada. I feel that you're good for Lucretia, and you might do Rowan a bit of good, too. Just don't let him scare you. Be honest with him. He's very lonely since I went back to work and Lucy's more independent. He's all alone in that sun-room with his words and his thoughts, probably going quite mad. Remember that you have power over him -- you could leave him all alone. Always think, 'I'm stronger than he is,' and you'll do fine."

In the nighttime I lay on my hard white bed in the mostly-empty dormitory at the girls' school, staring out the window at the shapes of trees in the dark. I tried to picture Rowan Leigh in his early twenties, twenty years ago, and couldn't; he seemed to have always been as he was now, forty-two, rather bald and stocky, with long bright eyes that watched everything and yet paid close attention to the inner workings. He didn't look like the closest thing to a famous poet there was in Britain, well-off and sought after for essays and sound-bites. He looked more like a computer-store manager. I envisioned him bent over a satin couch with a brown Moroccan boy vibrating away behind him, brown fingers splayed open on Leigh's smooth white hips.

I rolled over and put my face into the pillow.

Rowan Leigh moved about the room, gathering the things for afternoon tea. He smiled at me as I came in. "Lucy down?" he asked.

"She sleeps funny," I said, sitting in my chair across the table from his wicker chair. "Butt in the air."

"Yes, she's always done that. I hope she grows out of it someday. It would be very interesting for the fellow she marries, wouldn't it?" He came to rest finally, setting the steaming tea kettle on the knit coaster. "What did you two talk about today?"

"Astronomy, mainly. She loves planets. It's easy to teach her about it. I was just like that, but I was a little older -- maybe nine or ten. I used to pester my father to take me to the planetarium every weekend."

"What is that you're wearing today?" Leigh asked quizzically.

"Hm? What? It's jeans and a tee-shirt. Why?"

"I liked your school uniform," he said.

"It's not very comfortable," I said. "Or practical, when I'm going to roaming around with your daughter in the sheepcotes."

"But it makes you look so sweet. The knee socks. The skirt."

"Oh, don't tell me you've got a Catholic schoolgirl fetish," I scoffed.

He shrugged and blinked at me. "Yes," he said. "Anyway, you aren't Catholic."

"How do you know."

"Dearest, you're so WASP-y. Do me a favor. Wear your uniform once in a while for me?"

"All right," I said.

He poured my tea. "Milk, one sugar," he said.

"What did you look like when you were young?" I asked.

"Younger? Well." He rocked back in his chair and laughed. I blushed. "Back when I had hair. I have a photograph -- I have a hundred photographs, actually. Let me fetch you one."

He disappeared; and returned in a few moments with a set of yellowed color 8x10s. Two men and a woman graced the photo, wearing the oddest sort of post-hippie Expressionist garb; Leigh pointed himself out. "I'm the one in the middle. That's Amsterdam." The same face, really, just much thinner and with big haunting clinical eyes. His golden blond hair fell somewhat past his shoulders and he was wearing some sort of Marcel Marceau stripy top and black flares and platforms.

"What's so funny?" Leigh complained at me, poker-faced.

"Great shoes."

"They made me six feet tall. Who's complaining? Gimme." He took them back and slipped them into a drawer. "I was pretty though, wasn't I? I was addressed as Miss all the bloody time. In pubs."

"Funny how you turned out," I said.

"You are full of spirit today, my dear Ada. I think I like it."

"It's a defense mechanism," I admitted.

"Tell me a secret," he said.

"Like what."

He eyed me, smiling unwholesomely. "What do you think about when you masturbate?"

"What makes you think I do?"

"You'd be crazy if you didn't."

"That's too secret," I said. "I don't even tell myself."

"I accept that. But you will tell me eventually." He squinted at me. "And you must tell me something now. What color panties are you wearing?"

"Use your X-ray vision."

"Don't be naughty. Tell me, Ada."

"White," I said, "of course."

"Do your panties get sticky or wet when you become aroused?" His voice was always cool and level.

I said nothing. The room vibrated gently along a wavelength of warm green late June sunlight, his avid detached eyes never leaving my face.

"Are they sticky now?"

I swallowed and took a shaky sip of lukewarm tea.

"What could I say to you to make them wet?"

I licked my teeth and rolled my eyes. "Does your wife know that you're like this?"

"What, perverted? Oversexed? Oh, my sweet Ada, that's not going to be your way out. She knows. She likes me that way. She's rather a pervert herself. We always have something to talk about." He grinned, pouring himself fresh tea. "I'm surprised she didn't warn you about me."

"She did."

"Yes. Rather. I adore her. She adores me. We allow each other a certain level of freedom. For example I know she's seeing some gentleman in London on her lunch hours -- I believe he's an architect or something. A young fellow."

I squirmed. I could completely see it. Warm, rational Elisabeth with her neat expensive haircut and her red silk blouses, that little wink to me as if to say "you understand where I'm coming from?" She was fucking some architect with a hard, young sleek body and then coming home to Rowan and the kid with a Cheshire cat smile. And he knew all about it.

"You look pensive. Have I disturbed you?"

"No -- I mean -- I don't know. Don't you mind?"

"Why should I? Don't get worked up. Why don't you go sit in the garden until Lucy emerges from dreamland. I'll see you tomorrow."

When I went outside the wind blew between my legs and chilled the wetness.

I showed Leigh the photos that Lucy had taken with his camera of the garden turtles. "Don't tell her I showed them to you first. She wants to present them to you herself."

"Very nice. Show her how to develop film next and we won't have to send her to school."

I settled into my chair. It was grey out, threatening rain, and the sun room was pitched in gloom between the clouds and the trees crowding against the glass. The hot tea was welcome.

"Do you pull your nipples?" he asked.

"No," I said slowly.

"It's very nice. Why don't you try the things I suggest?"

"Oh, hell."

"How about your labia? Or your pubic hair?"

"No. No. No."

"How do you masturbate? Do you do that pillow-rubbing thing that so many American girls seem to favor?"

"No."

"Edge of the bed?"

"No."

"Do you think about rock musicians? Or Tom Cruise?"

"Yuck. Not Tom Cruise."

"Have you ever tried the bathtub method?"

I bit my tongue crossways between my teeth. "Yeah," I said.

"Oh! So you aren't inert. Do you prefer it to any other method?"

"No. I just tried it once. After I read about it in Cosmo."

"Did it work? Did it get you off?"

"Not by itself."

He grunted. "Yes. Rather." He refreshed my cup. "So what method do you prefer? What works every time?"

"Nothing works every time. Sometimes I fall asleep."

"Do you masturbate in the middle of the day?"

"Um... I think I have once."

"What brought it on?"

"I don't remember."

"I often do," he offered.

"Oh really?"

Sometimes nothing brings it on. Sometimes I'll run across an item of my wife's clothing -- usually something neutral like a tee-shirt or a bathrobe but sometimes a stocking that holds the shape of her leg, or a pair of knickers. Sometimes I'm just bored. Sometimes I will be turned on my something I've seen on television. Or in a book. Jane Austen gets me excited. Are there books that get you sexually excited that aren't sexual in and of themselves?"

"Sigmund Freud," I said.

"Oh, now, he doesn't count, almost. All those perversions. He's practically soft-core porn."

"Then there isn't anything."

"I am not going to believe for a second that a fifteen-year-old girl isn't more randomly sexual than a forty-year-old man," Leigh insisted.

"Not by unsexual books."

He reached into his desk. "Do you want some sexy ones? I've got a couple. You like Bataille?"

"Rowan --" I cut off my voice with an impatient sigh. "I don't want to look at sexy books. What makes you think I have time to read sexy books?"

He was smiling. "It's Bataille," he said. "It's literature." He watched me interestedly as I accepted the slim paperback, well-thumbed, and held it on my lap. "I don't think I've ever seen a young girl so anxious about reading smutty literature. What's the matter? Are you trying not to masturbate? Do you think that maybe you're wasting your energies and that you won't have so much to give away when you're ready?"

"God, you are so strange."

"It was just a question."

"I do kind of try not to," I said with virtuous difficulty. "I think it's dangerous to become obsessed with sex. It wastes mental energy more than anything. I see other girls at my school who think about little else and they get terrible grades."

"I see." He folded his hand over his mouth.

"Now you're laughing at me."

"I just think you're so sweet."

"Oh God."

"Did I get you excited yesterday?"

"I should go check on Lucy," I said, rising from my chair. I was shaking violently.

Rowan Leigh watched me intently but made no move to stop me, physically, or verbally.

On some days we didn't speak. He would write carefully and rapidly in a small graph-paper notebook, or stare fixedly at proofs of his poetry, back from the printer's, or he would just sit silent and stare at me, smiling or not. I would always come, because I was supposed to; Elisabeth insisted that he knew I was there and appreciated my presence, even if he chose not to respond to me. When he didn't speak to me, I slept in the chair, or I read proofs, or I filled in a crossword puzzle. Or at times, I stared back, defying him to say something or break his placid demeanor.

Most days though he kept up his gentle, persistent questioning. He asked me how I felt about my father; whether I believed in an inevitable sexual attraction between father and daughter. I told him the truth; that there was no such thing between my father and I, that I was more his mascot and protege than anything else, and that I thought of my father as my sensei, someone who I didn't always get along with perfectly, but who would always help me learn as much as I could.

"A boddhisatva, then."

"Exactly."

"I wonder at times what my role in daughter's life will be," Leigh sighed. "I am here for her quite a bit -- far more than most modern fathers are. I'm a bit of a glorified house-husband. I just write poems once in a while. Lucy astonishes me more than anything else in the world. I'm incredibly impressed by her. I'm very glad she has someone young and brilliant looking after her when my wife and I can't."

"Thank you."

"I hope she'll grow up similarly to you."

"She won't. She has a mother -- not terribly present, but she has a mother. I wonder what I'd be like if I had grown up with a mother or with siblings or in a non-academic setting. I suppose I'm a very rarified person. The only thing I ever knew was my father and the campus and books and professors and professor's wives."

"But you never resented your father," Leigh said.

"Well, God no. He's a fucking saint."

His eyebrows shot up. "You've never sworn before, Ada."

"Oh." I blushed. "I do once in a while. I really love my dad."

He relaxed in his chair and stroked his cheek with his thumb. "Let's talk about sex again," he said.

"All right," I murmured. I laughed faintly and brushed the hair off my face. "I probably don't have any choice."

"Did you like the Bataille?"

I blushed. "It was... um... excessive."

"Actually I find that that book is relatively restrained. Did you like the part when they gang-rape the priest?"

"Very Surrealist. Surrealists always want to fuck with the Catholic Church. I suppose he could have been more subtle about it, it didn't leave very much to the imagination." I had gone over the book in a single sitting, shifting positions in bed all night, alternately laughing and lapsing into horrified silence. It was a sexy little number though. On the inside was transcribed, *to Rowan, the best. R.* Not Elisabeth. I conjectured that he had given it to himself. "The Surrealists are adolescents."

"Well said. I agree. I also find adolescents delicious." He blinked serenely at me. "Are you a virgin?"

He hadn't asked that before. I thought about it. "Technically, physically, or emotionally?' I countered.

"Ah. Very good. Each."

"Technically...no I guess... I fooled around with a Greek professor's son when I was ten. Physically, no, of course --"

"Of course?"

I went on without taking the bait. "Emotionally, yes."

"What do you mean, of course?"

"I didn't even know what I was doing," I said.

"Oh dear. Do tell."

"I was a little kid. Messing around with myself. A boring summer. I broke it with my middle finger. What in the world are you doing?"

His soft, clean, workless hand had slipped into the loose waistband of his khaki shorts. It was a hot day and both of us were barely dressed. "I was just checking," he said innocently.

My face felt so hot I thought about fainting. My whole body freaked out; blood rushed to odd places and I could smell my sweat springing out. Leigh laughed at me. "You look," he gasped, "so scandalized."

"Oh, my God. Oh my God."

"I was just thinking of you fingering yourself, you're too young to understand anything but that it feels better the further you go..." He squeezed his eyes shut and his hand roved further down the khaki. I jumped up from the chair and went to a corner of the sun room, cowering there, getting hot and cold chills.

He got up and followed me. He put his hand on my shoulder. "It's all right," he murmured. "You don't have to deal with it. I'm an old perv. It's all right."

I turned and stared at him hostily. "How can you do it," I hissed.

He shook his head. "Go lie down," he said coolly.

I obeyed. I went and lay down in the spare room and cried into the pillow.

Eventually I fell into a dead sleep and didn't wake up until Elisabeth came home at seven o'clock. She brought me back to the dorms and I stumbled upstairs and went back to sleep. I didn't dream that I can remember.

The next day I wore the schoolgirl's uniform.

I had to leave part way through August to go back and prepare for school. I was pretty sad about having to leave; I was completely in love with the old manor house and the sheepy hills and the turtles, and Lucy and I were less governess and charge than big authoritarian sister and little cheerfully ignorant sister. Elisabeth and I had discovered our mutual love of BBC One on the car stereo.

Then there was Rowan Leigh. When I wasn't with him being interrogated I dreamt about sitting across the teak writing-table from him, telling him the things I wouldn't really tell him because they were too explicit to be true. I had read some of his poetry before, my father had his first book lying around the house, but being able to read the fresh poetry with the bran still on -- the proofs -- was dangerously seductive. His poetry was crisp and austere, almost emotionless on the surface, but there was a lot of violence underneath it. He was compared to Eliot all the time, but without the apocalyptic rantings. Rowan Leigh was more of a Zen chaos poet.

Besides that, I had grown used to his face and his form; I no longer saw him as an odd bald fellow without much shape to him. He had a comfy, lazy grace; his wicked serpentine eyebrows and slightly overripe mouth betrayed his sensuality.

But I wasn't in love with him. He simply wasn't the sort that young girls get crushes on, and despite my carefully cultivated sang-froid, I was a young girl through and through. But he affected me. I thought about him constantly. The idea of being free of him worried me. I had begun to enjoy the daily terror and embarrassment. My naivete was, as promised, wearing down.

On the last day, Lucy didn't want to waste time by sleeping, but she was so exhausted that she passed out in the middle of a sentence as we sat talking on her embroidered loveseat. I pulled off her shoes and settled her on her side and left her room quietly.

I turned, instinctively, to the sun room, but I found it empty for the first time. He knew it was ending as well. I decided to get a glass of water from the kitchen and go outside, to the stream, to watch the turtles sun themselves.

Rowan Leigh was in the lower drawing room, pulling pages of proofs together into little piles in front of him. He always changed things around incessantly before sending them to the printers. I stood and looked at him for a long time. He hadn't heard me come in.

I then walked up quickly and put my hand on the back of his neck, above the open collar of his faded red shirt. He turned, not startled, and looked curiously at me without speaking. I pressed my mouth against his lower lip.

He embraced me very gently and naturally and the tip of his tongue moved between my lips. It was not bad. We tasted one another. He pulled me forward and I climbed into his lap and he slipped his hand between my thighs, casually, not as if he wanted anything. Oh God. Oh yes. I had suspected that he was the best kisser in the world and now I had the proof.

He reached up into my shirt, fingered me over my bra, then under. I stopped kissing and rested my forehead against his. "Goodbye," he murmured, pinching the nipple gently. "I'll remember your goosebumps."

So I had a normal year in New Haven after that; I went to school, I went on two dates with a new English prof's son and he kissed me chastely once and then didn't call again; I watched Rowan Leigh's new book come out and be basically ignored by the world at large.

I was maddeningly sexually awakened. That middle-of-the-day masturbation became par for the course. I got inventive with how I was going to find time and space for it. Every time I touched myself, I remembered Rowan and his disturbing little smiles.

As it turned out, Elisabeth Leigh was just as busy the next year as she had been the year before; and she went through the same channels to find a governess for Lucy. She asked specifically for me. I leapt at the chance almost without thought. My father thought it was "grand" that they were so impressed with me that they would ask for me again and cough up the necessary money. "You're saving so much money," he joked with me, "you don't even have to go to Yale if you don't want to."

"So," said Rowan Leigh, "here you are again."

He had a little less hair and a little less weight. The contours of his youthful face were returning somewhat, interpreted by the deep concentration lines on his forehead and the creases at the corners of his mouth. "Here I am again," I said.

"You cut your hair. I like it."

"It's also a little darker," I said. "I was sick of being a lemon blonde."

"It will darken with age. I was a platinum blonde child."

"Yes," I said.

"Do you want to talk, or do you want to fool around?" he asked.

I laughed. "I'd rather talk right now," I said.

"Yes. Rather." He poured hot water over leaves of Earl Grey. "I changed our tea, I hope you don't mind."

"Not at all."

"You've been jerking off more, haven't you?"

I could still be astonished by him. "Yes," I said.

"I can smell it."

"I can't help it," I said.

"I think it's lovely. How do you do it?"

"I just... you know... stroke... um."

"Yes. Rather! That's the way it's done. That's how I do it as well. That's probably how Queen Elizabeth does it." He rolled his shoulders in the wicker chair, nearly purring with delight. "Have you ever thought about being tied up? Forced?"

"Uh..."

"It's a common fantasy. It says nothing about you as a person. It's rather one of mine. I was just curious."

"Sometimes. I wanted to ask you something."

"Oh really? Yes, do."

"I wanted to know... when you and your wife are making love ... who gets to be on top?"

He laughed gently. "Oh, I see. Well, we switch off."

"Are you guys kinky or do you stick with normal stuff with each other?"

"It depends. If we're tired, we'll be boring or we'll skip it altogether. Fortunately we're both energetic people, I've got an overactive imagination and she's got an overactive libido, so we usually find the time."

"Do you like to top?"

"My dear sweet Ada, you learned a new term this year! Good for you. Excellent. Do I? Yes, I do. I also like to be topped. I have no deep burning need to be one or the other; it's all great fun to me. I believe my wife, if she has a preference, prefers to top."

"I see."

"Where did you learn that term? Have you been topping the Yale freshmen?"

"I'm not that young and stupid."

"I guess not, my dear. Pardon me."

"Let's play a game," Leigh said.

A cool day, just after a rain.

"Stand up, Ada."

I stood.

"Turn round." I did. "Now lift your skirt."

Carefully, slowly, I raised the hem. I pulled it all the way up to my waist. I heard his quiet reaction behind me. He probably had his dick in hand already. Oh well, let him.

"Turn round again, please."

I looked at him as I turned. I had been right -- his left hand was gone beneath the table. His eyes were coolly interested, bright lights reflecting off the corneas. "Do you trim your pubic hair?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Interesting. You can lower your skirt now."

"Some game," I said, letting the hem drop to my thighs.

"Do you want to see my cock?" he asked quietly.

"What if I say no?"

"I'll know you're lying. I'll know you're either scared or disgusted, and I don't believe a scientific girl like yourself would be disgusted."

He was pretty much right. He knew it, too. He angled his head at me. "Bring your chair round," he said.

I picked up my chair and brought it around the table till it was on the same side as his for the first time. I sat down uneasily.

His loose pants buttoned. He swept the buttons apart and the flesh appeared, gripped in his stronger left hand. It was a nice looking penis as far as they go -- at best they have a kind of earnest homeliness. His erection was truly impressive, though, bright and shiny as satin. I looked and then I looked away.

"I'll touch you if you touch me first," he said.

"Maybe I don't feel like being touched."

"Maybe I'll grab you. Right where you like to be grabbed."

People like to make me blush because it looks very dramatic with my pale hair and eyebrows. Maybe that's why he did stuff like that. "I hate you," I said.

"Yes. I hate you too."

I reached out without looking. He took my hand firmly, almost hurtfully, and placed it along the shaft of his penis. A strong, thready twitching, his heartbeat, ran through it. He let me go after a second, and kissed my arm above the wrist.

He leaned forward and kissed my thigh above the knee, tickling it with his breath. I wiggled. "Want some more?" he asked.

"Not right now." I wanted him inside me, slamming me as hard as he could, preferably in a four-poster bed, tied tight so I couldn't get away or even move or do anything but sit still and be fucked. Leigh sat back and buttoned his pants and sat composed, drinking his Earl Grey. I moved my chair a few feet away from his and smoothed my hair.

He demonstrated what he meant by nipple-pulling, on himself. It was raining and hot at the same time, and the sun room was dark as hell, the windows steamed up with humidity trying to escape. Under his shirt he was in better shape than I thought, his nipples the size of ten-pence coins, pale until he began pulling them, when then became cabernet-dark. "In gay male sex parlance there's this thing called 'tit play' or 'tit work'... it usually involves the extremely painful manipulations of pierced nipples or nipple piercing... I thought about piercing mine, but then I decided they would be fine the way they were. If I get a pierce it will be very ambitious." What he was doing looked vaguely painful to me, pulling the nipple out far and twisting, pinching it between his nails. His face became flushed. "You don't have to pinch this hard. You're still quite young... isn't necessary..."

"It looks like it hurts."

"No, it's great. I'll show you, if you want me to."

"I think I'll watch you."

He moved to the other tit. He was definitely going now, his eyes glazing and a red flush moving down his neck and chest. He stopped and looked at me. "You look concerned."

I laughed. "No," I said, "it's just absorbing."

He sat back and sipped his tea, iced tea this time, mint made in the Arabic style. "I now have a massive hard-on," he complained.

"It'll go away," I said.

"Not so long as you're here."

"I'm sorry..."

"Don't be. I'd rather look at you and be painfully aroused than sit in a mental vacuum." He closed his eyes. "God, it's hot. I don't care for weather this hot and damp. It makes me think of malaria. Ada, come here."

I was half asleep from the heat myself; I approached. He pulled me down into his lap and rubbed himself against me in a circle. I had a sudden flashback to the sight of it; the remembrance of a cock is always more exciting than the reality of it -- and I pressed against him in response.

We ground together gently, circling, for a long while. He didn't touch any more of me than my hips, holding me firmly down to him, and he didn't kiss my neck or anything, though I could feel his moist breath through my ponytail. His hard sharp protrusion slid against my thighs and between them, then back to the thigh again. There were three layers of clothes between us. The friction was painful but it was the best part and I understood him completely.

At last he sighed and he let me go. I rested for another second, then I moved back to my own chair. I glanced at him worriedly from under the lace of my sticky bangs. "You didn't...?" I asked.

"No. Mission accomplished, though. I reabsorbed my arousal, so to speak. I can do that, now I'm forty. If I had been ten years younger I would have had to have the orgasm or I'd be running about with a poker sticking out of me till I did. This isn't as glamourous, but it makes life a bit more elegant."

I shook my head.

"How are you?"

"I'll live," I said. "That's what's nice about being a girl. I'll be crazy, but really only I'll know."

Leigh laughed. "True."

"Come here," he said rather sternly.

I approached, chewing on my thumbnail. At times his face was like stone; unreadable, impossibly introspective. Always the lights glittered forth from his eyes.

"Come all the way here."

I did so.

"Bend over my knee," he said.

Inside my alarms went off, but I did so, panting lightly with excitement. I was wearing my uniform -- he had asked me to do so -- a jumper with short pleated skirt and a white shirt with peter pan collar, knee socks and mary janes. I was dressed like a nine-year-old. I felt like a pedophile myself, dressing to please one.

With great ceremony he pulled my skirt up to my waist, exposing my backside to the air. It was a cooler day and the breeze caught the fine hairs along my back and thighs.

"You're trembling," he said in a cool, detached voice.

He proceeded to spank me. Not too hard, not enough to make me stagger, but enough to sting like hell. Then when he caressed the skin it tickled. A lot of mysteries were revealed to me.

He grasped my white panties and drew them up so that they sank into my buttocks and caught on my pubic bones, forming a tight band against my clitoris. If he simply kept up the pressure, occasionally loosening and tightening it again, I would have come simply by that.

But he slid the panties down over my thighs, streaking them with moisture. I felt a tiny plum pit of fear in my stomach. This was going pretty far. When was he going to stop? When was I going to stop him? I knew that if I sat up and told him that that was enough, he would stop without a word. But I just wasn't telling him to stop. It wasn't that he wasn't banking on a lot of subconscious desires I had for him to do things to me without my permission. He wouldn't hurt me really. He had just given me a play spanking; my ass was so soft a feather would hurt it. My father had never given me a whole spanking, just the occasional smack on the behind when I was very small and uncooperative. It was interesting.

Rowan Leigh was parting me. He pulled my vaginal lips apart like he was opening a fig -- that much briskness. He skipped his fingers back and forth in the juices. I gripped my fists in the fabric of his pants. His erection poked into my breasts, throbbing urgently. He was a master at this. It wasn't fair. He had all the necessary weaponry.

Also without romance he plunged a forefinger into me. His fingers were much bigger than mine. It felt closer to a cock than anything I'd ever had. I bit his pants. He laughed. The other finger slid up and poked me in the clit.

A slow, rocking fucking, insistent and deep, especially when he grew bold and slid another finger in. That actually almost hurt. I was nearly ashamed of how damned virginal I was. It was through no particular effort. I was more attuned to books and Harper's Magazine than to actually experiencing sex with someone else. I just had never had anything inside me larger than my own wimpy little middle finger which blew my mind at that early age.

I came, after a strange long time, because I held off and didn't want it to end. Finally I couldn't stop it and it had me more than the other way round. I swallowed my cries in case Lucy suddenly decided to become a light sleeper, then relaxed slowly across his knees, drawing my breath back in again. I still had shoes on.

"Did you know that women ejaculate?" he said to me very quietly. "You just have. In my hand. I hope I can return the favor soon." I rolled slightly over to see him sucking his fingers clean. "Do you want some tea? The water's still hot."

On my last day that year I cried. Rowan was not even slightly discombobulated; he held me on his lap and shushed me, rocking me back and forth and stroking my hair. My gangly legs hung out into space and my breasts pressed tight against his ribs; yet he comforted me as sexlessly as he would his own daughter.

"I hate going back," I muttered, accepting the proffered handkerchief and blowing my messy nose into it.

"Going back to sanity?" Rowan put my head back against his shoulder and kept rocking.

"I'm not sane anymore though. I'm not normal. I have nothing in common with those other kids. How am I supposed to get back into the history of the French Revolution and sweet sixteen parties and all that shit?"

His laughter shook the bundle of the two of us together. "You don't have to," he said. "Go off on your own. You're a solitary, Ada. Nobody will expect you to become a socialite if it's not in your nature. People will just begin to notice that you smell engaging. You walk more gracefully."

"Maybe I'll come out here for college," I said.

"I think you oughtn't to do that."

We sat still for a while. "I know it's stupid, but will you miss me?" I said into the damp fabric of his shoulder.

"It is stupid. Of course I miss you. You're my friend." He stared at me earnestly, his forehead drawing down. "I'll write you when Lucy writes you."

In January I turned seventeen years old.

Rowan's predictions did, of course, come true; I didn't suddenly become an airhead, since I hadn't been inclined to be one before. Nor did I wisp away into a sexually-consumptive ghost. I went to my extra-credit college courses and made some friends at Yale, some of the same spacey-earnest-overachiever cloth from which I was cut. I spent more time with my father, talking more about my mother than we had in years. I grew three inches.

I got three letters from Lucy and Elisabeth and Rowan in the intervening months; Lucy sent drawings and newspaper clippings, Elisabeth sent marked books from her publishing house, and Rowan sent long typewritten-and-hand-embellished letters that rambled off into nowhere.

One of the marked books that Elisabeth sent me was of Rowan's newest book of poems; four of the twenty-eight poems were dedicated to me.

In general those poems were sensual.

My father announced to me sometime after Christmas that the Leighs were coming to New Haven for a visit of some kind, an academic convention or some such nonsense, and they had expressed interest in dropping by for an evening. I stared at my dad with my mouth open for a long time. "Here? They're coming here? Why?" I stammered.

Father looked at me quizzically, tapping his egg with a spoon. "Don't forget that Elisabeth was my friend first," he said. "What's the matter? Do you mind? I thought I'd have them over for some sherry, some Scrabble, you know, my sort of decrepit enjoyments."

I shook my head and laughed. I was blushing furiously. "No -- I mean, of course it's all right. I'm pleased. Are they bringing Lucy too?"

"They are."

As shameful to admit as it is, I didn't sleep much for the intervening nights.

The Leighs showed up on an appropriately snowy night, while the Christmas lights were still casting their pastel shadows on the drifts outside. Some of Father's other friends from the faculty had joined us as well, hoping to get to meet the esteemed poet Rowan. I got to play the hostess of my father's genteel English supper, complete with lamb and mint sauce and custard for dessert.

Rowan paid no special attention to me particularly, busy fending off the inquistive barbs of his admirers, and I spent most of my time hearing every single thing that Lucy had done since I last saw her. Rowan soliticiously fed his daughter a dram of Father's sherry, and before the dessert dishes were cleared away, she was falling asleep.

There was more sherry for everyone, and the aforementioned Scrabble; Father's more modern-minded dinner guests made their exits here, having no desire to go ten rounds with old "Three-Letter Stowensen". The Leighs remained; Elisabeth could not resist a challenge. She made Lucy comfortable on a pile of coats in our spare bedroom, and hunkered down around the table with my dad and a professor of Spanish Communist Doctrines.

Somehow, on unspoken signal, Rowan and I retreated together to the other living room on the other end of the house, where Father kept his Victrola and 78s. Rowan found one of the old heavy vinyl discs that interested him, wound up the machine, and put it on. He angled his head at me and held out his arm in the international sign language for "shall we dance?"

We did something of the kind. I could look directly into his eyes now, rather than at his upper lip, and he stared in vain over the top of my head. "My lord, you've grown," he said.

"Now I don't look like such a shrimp."

"Your Dad puts out a lovely spread for an old windbag like me," Rowan said.

"He's very into the idea of entertaining. All those faculty dinners and mixers. Besides, we had all this sherry that we had to get rid of before it turned into vinegar."

"I noticed you putting it away, my dear Ada."

"I noticed you slipping your little one the mickey," I said.

"She's got a thing for sherry."

We fell silent for a bit, trying not to step on each other's toes. Elisabeth's laughter floated down the hall to us -- seven-letter word, no doubt. I almost pitied my poor father. Rowan clasped the small of my back tightly and dipped me, wiggling his left eyebrow like Errol Flynn. "I'm flattered," I said.

"I am flattered, my lady."

"Lady now? Not child?"

"Have you looked at yourself lately?"

After a pause, I murmured, "Ever thought of hiring yourself out?"

"Bottling myself, perhaps. Spread me on toast, unlock your frigid wife. Get rid of that bothersome virginity problem. I'm sorry, did I shock you?"

"No," I said, and that was true.

He was smiling, his eyes befuddled with a half-dozen sherries. I still couldn't tell their color -- just dark, not really brown. I ran my fingers lightly over his bare scalp and I could see the goose pimples rising on his neck. "If your wife catches us, you're toast," I said.

"I'm more worried about your pop. Wife'll understand. She's caught me dancing with blokes before, hand down pants. Mainly she just gets me home to bed and then attacks me. Your father though... he'll throw down the gauntlet, challenge me to a duel to avenge his only child's lost virtue..."

"Why didn't I get you drunk before? You're hell on wheels."

"Emphasis on the 'wheels'?" By inches he had flicked his tongue against my ear and was now trolling the depths; for some reason though I'd been through far more extreme things, I had never felt this. I tickled him to get him to stop. We were giggling like kindergarteners at the movies, darting nervous glances out the open door of the parlor down the hall. The Scrabble game was out of the line of sight.

"Do you still have that golden fleece between your legs?" he whispered in the wet ear.

"Yeah," I said, "wanna see?"

He shook his head; and at first I thought that he was shaking his head no. But he kept on shaking it, his eyes focussed on nothing. I rested my arms around him and squeezed him, offering him comfort for the first time rather than the other way round, and he kissed my forehead and smiled.

"I won't be coming back this summer," I said. "I have to go to school."

"I thought as much. Well, I enjoyed educating you, as such." He was quiet for a long while, and I was afraid he was brooding; but as soon as I was convinced of his melancholy, he dipped me over again so that the blood rushed to my head.

* * * * *

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