Update: Fixed the dark smudges in the bottom right of the image, which has been bugging me since I uploaded this image. Mar 12, 2011
I shivered, nestled against her warmth. The chills of spring still clung tenaciously, leaving me cold to the bone. She carried me lightly on one arm, running her free hand through my hair, watching me with those deep blue eyes. I wanted to cry, to scream and beat my small piteous fists against her.
"Take me with you," I whispered. My voice trembled.
—
The older ones always said they would break your heart, these college girls that arrived when the leaves began to wink into yellow and red, warmed themselves among us townie boys through the dark winter, before leaving in the bright spring sunshine. They told us we'd be nothing to them, these young blue-blooded women of privilege. They told us that it would be safer to try and secure the stabler favors of a woman from town. But we were young boys, and naive.
I was no longer as naive as before. I had not been her only boy here of course—she had kept several, and taken many others, no doubt—but of those she kept steady she had treated like gentlemen, unlike the way some of her girlfriends had treated theirs. Only once had she made me perform a degrading public act at a sorority party, and wiping my tears away the next morning she had made clear that this would not happen again. I know now, of course, there were other boys for that. But still, among her boys, she had kept me for four years, longer than any other I knew of.
A kept boy of a college girl mistress gets used to the finer things; nicer clothes, better food, a more comfortable life. On the nights I did not spend at the sorority house with her I had a rented room in a house in the nicer part of town, with several boys of other girls. The pocket money she gave me meant I did not need to work at the all-night diner, that I no longer had to dodge the pawing of drunk women, or endure those times when one of the boys would be chosen to crawl on hands and knees beneath the desk of Ms. Tracy the owner, or suffer those walks home all huddled together with the other boys in the frigid morning darkness in sheer terror of any looming shadow over us or the heavy cracks of a woman's footsteps around the corner. Was that what I had to go back to, even if Ms. Tracy would have me?
And of course, there was her. No longer would there be evenings spent on her lap at the dinner table in the sorority dining hall, listening to the rapid conversations of these girls, so sharp and quick, swerving deftly into topics of dizzying intellect or ribald hilarity that would leave us boys in either dumb incomprehension or, among those of us who could keep up with their turns of phrase, blushing hotly, clinging ever tighter to his girl. No longer would I wait for her, lying naked on her bed, beneath warm luxuriant covers as she studied at her desk, waiting for her to reach over and flick back the downy duvet, watch her looking at me.
No longer would I share her bed, feel her firm and unyielding body wreak its exquisite and rough torture upon my own, thrown about like a helpless leaf in an insatiable roaring hurricane, long into the night.
—
I breathed in her scent, clinging to her. I heard her intake of breath, as if she was breahing in my own. Still she said nothing. And then with a brush of her cheek, she gently pushed my head backwards, and I felt her lips on mine, and I could do nothing else but melt before her.
