? ? ?
SOMETIME LATER WHEN they were glued together by sweat from knee to belly to breast, Jack said, “You look like you just spent a whole day in the desert sun.” And realized that as unusual a woman as Anna might be, she was unlikely to take this as a compliment, though he meant it as one. He had never seen anything more beautiful than Anna flushed and breathless and undone, her hair rioting around her face.
She had to make an effort to focus her gaze on him. “What?”
“Nothing important.” Jack rolled to his side but kept his face right next to hers, feathering small kisses over her jaw and her neck until she shuddered.
“So,” she said. “That’s what all the fuss is about.”
He hummed agreement, wondering if there was anything he might say here that wouldn’t get him in one kind of trouble or another. She hadn’t been a virgin, but her surprise had been genuine. Then it occurred to him that this was a question he could ask Anna, just as long as it didn’t sound like a question.
“That wasn’t your first climax.”
“Um, well. It was the first one I didn’t arrange on my own. Oh look, now you’re blushing. Many women masturbate, you know. It’s exactly that fact that has the Comstocks of the world up in arms. They think we’ll do away with men entirely and let the undesirables do all the reproducing.”
“But this was different. I hope.” He rubbed his face against her breast to give himself time to digest this new, oddly intriguing idea and his voice came muffled.
“Oh, yes.” She slid down too, so they were face-to-face once again. “We don’t have to talk about this if it makes you uneasy.”
“That would be a shame,” Jack said, pulling her closer. “Because I have a lot of questions I never thought I’d be able to ask.”
She gave him her widest, most brilliant smile. “I’ve got a few of my own. And—” She hesitated, but then pushed on. “I’ve never been able to really study a male body. Or rather, I’ve only been able to study the very old and the very young. And the dead.”
Jack wondered if there had ever been such an odd conversation between two people in this particular situation. Most men would be shocked, and many of them would run in the other direction. Anna knew that, which meant she trusted him. He lay back and put his hands behind his head, stretched out to his full length despite the undeniable proof that the conversation had only reawakened his interest.
“I’m yours to command,” he said. “Until it’s my turn.”
? ? ?
THEY WALKED BACK to Waverly Place but talked hardly at all. Anna’s thoughts were humming through her, taking her further and further away. She was feeling guilty, but if she said so to Jack he would think it was about what had happened between them, and that wasn’t the case at all.
“Regrets?”
“Oh, no, not a single regret.” She took his arm.
“But you are arguing with yourself, I can almost hear it.”
“I am, I suppose.”
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
She thought she must. It was another test, and a necessary one.
“There are some things I should know better than to joke about,” Anna told him. “I’m unsure whether to tell you why, if it might be more than you want to hear. In technical, medical terms,” she added.
“I like hearing about your surgeries, and I’ve got a strong stomach.”
“Well, then. Listen. A few months ago I had a patient, a fifteen-year-old with abdominal pain. Her mother brought her in.”
She paused, but he didn’t give the least sign of hesitation or boredom. And so she told him about Kathleen O’Brien, who had brought her fifteen-year-old daughter to Anna’s office to be examined. Mrs. O’Brien was embarrassed but determined, and after some close questioning, Anna realized what she was asking. Her daughter was very ill and needed surgery, but they didn’t have the money to go to one of the bigger hospitals. She was worried not just for her daughter’s health and well-being, but for her immortal soul. The girl had fallen into the sin of self-gratification.
She felt Jack start in surprise, and so she slowed down a little as she sought the right words to talk about a sincere, religious woman who believed that her daughter’s trouble could be cut away. You can make the trouble go away, Mrs. O’Brien had said to her. Just take it all away, and she won’t be plagued by temptation.
While Anna told him about that meeting with Mrs. O’Brien and her daughter, she watched Jack’s expression go flat and thoughtful.
“She wanted you to operate and—”
“Yes. She wanted me to operate and remove everything external that made her daughter female. Not the internal organs; she wanted her to be able to have children. But everything else genital.”