A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
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I turned twenty-one today. We didn't have enough money to go out to eat, and there were not enough ingredients in the larder to bake any kind of dessert from scratch, so we are sharing some packaged cupcakes we got from a convenience store in lieu of traditional birthday cake.
We've been seeing each other for several weeks now. I hesitate to call it "dating," or to call him my "boyfriend," because he's twice my age, and "dating" and "boyfriends" seem inappropriately adolescent as ways to describe an affair with him - and it is an affair. We aren't boyfriend and girlfriend, going steady and making plans to attend the prom. We're lovers.
He gave me a birthday present: a rare used hardback copy of the poems of Emily Dickinson. It's an antique first edition - maybe not of the poems themselves, but certainly of that particular anthology, which was printed in the very early part of this century. And it's in mint condition. This is probably the reason my "birthday cake" consists of plastic-wrapped snack food. I'll take the book over cake any day, though, especially when part of my present involves his reading aloud to me.
Wild nights, wild nights,
were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
our luxury -
He punctuates the verses with kisses: my forehead, my cheeks, my hair, my neck. My lips. My lips are burning under his. He has such soft, warm lips, to take my breath away.
Futile the winds
to the heart in port -
Done with the compass,
done with the chart -
Time to screw my courage to the sticking point.
I lean back into his embrace, and interrupt him by whispering in his ear, "Master, teach me."
His breath stops, and I feel his body suddenly become as tense as a bowstring. Any more tense and he'll be jumping out of his skin.
"What?"
"I know what you want. And I know what I want. Master, teach me."
He groans quietly and closes his eyes. He's closing them against himself, I think. That can't be very effective.
"You don't know what you're asking."
"I ransacked your personal library on our last few dates, remember? Then there was that little game of Twenty Questions we played last night. Good heavens. I know what I'm asking."
"Do you have any idea what kind of effect you're having on me?"
"Yes. Yes, I do. I know because I can see you. Silly. I can reach out and feel you, too, where you're threatening to burst out of your pants. Master, teach me. I want to apprentice myself."
