The Englishman

chapter 33

THE FALL SEMESTER CONCLUDES WITH TWO PARTIES, but I am not much looking forward to either of them. The first is Bernie’s and Elvira’s house-warming. I know, because she told me, that one item on Elvira’s agenda for the evening is to introduce me to as many single men as she can manage. It’s nice of her to do that, and I make an effort to play my part. The long-sleeved black dress that covers my knees and collarbones is what is known in some circles as “sexy tznius.” Tznius is modest attire according to Jewish orthodox custom. The sexy part is that it is close-fitting and has tiny mother-of-pearl buttons all down the back. It works, in a severe sort of way, but I don’t do it justice. I know I’m an ungrateful wretch, but I simply cannot muster the spirit to flirt, let alone be really interested, in any man who isn’t Giles Cleveland, and I feel appropriately guilty when I make my excuses and flee without having encouraged anyone to even ask me for my phone number.

“You’re choosy,” Bernie remarks, a little reproachfully, when he sees me to my taxi.

“I’m in the wrong place. I’m sorry, Bernie.”

The second party is the annual Ardrossan Christmas fête. The original tradition, which required guests to turn out in Victorian costume, has been relaxed to allow all sorts of period, vintage or fancy attire, but I am warned that Not Making an Effort is frowned upon. So once again I am sitting in the back of a cab, all dolled up, this time in a dark burgundy taffeta sheath dress with lace detailing, knee-length, a little Givenchy, something Audrey Hepburn might have worn in the early sixties. And yes, I have long, burgundy gloves to go with it, and tonight I will wear them. What nobody knows except me and the little devil sitting on my left shoulder is that the sheer black pantyhose I seem to be wearing are actually a pair of thigh-high stockings with very fancy lace tops. I have never worn them, and tonight they will keep the gloves company.

The façades of all buildings between Rossan House and the Observatory have been decorated with festive garlands of light bulbs; enormous Christmas trees are ablaze by the two main entrances, and an area has been fenced off in the yard for a huge log that will be lit on fire when the President, from his stage up on the portal of the Observatory, has welcomed us to the party. Incongruous but mouthwatering smells are wafted on the mild winter breeze, of gingerbread and mulled wine, hot baked goods and, less appetizing to a vegetarian, frying meat. It’s a splendid sight; smiling people admire each other in their elaborate costumes, and in the firelight, the neo-gothic buildings look more like a fairy-tale film set than ever. It is a pity that I have no prince to guide me through the crowd.

I take my coat and a bag of books up to my office and on the way there have the dubious pleasure of receiving a wolf-whistle from one of the security guards posted on each floor. They are not taking any chances this time.

“Baby, you look ab-so-lute-ly fabulous!”

Being enveloped by Tim’s enthusiasm in his cobalt blue suit and tie with a dark blue shirt underneath is like being hugged by the Cookie Monster; it’s a great comfort, but one gets a little breathless after a while.

“Get yourself a drink,” he urges me. “You’re behind by two cups of punch!”

“Yes, I think I need some liquid fortification. This is overwhelming!”

“Yeah, you can say what you like about the old place, but it does look pretty. Pity there’s no snow. Two years ago we had snow before Christmas, and a lot of it, so someone organized a sleigh drawn by four horses. What a sight! Enough to bring tears to the eyes of all the alumni. Unfortunately it all got out of hand when a couple of drunken undergrads dressed up the horses as reindeers and one of them bolted and knocked over half the madrigal choir. One of the horses, I mean, not one of the students. Come!”

“Tim. Tim!” I grab his arm and force him to look at me. “I’m not bein’ ’orrible, darlin’, but you reek of gin. And you can’t. Not on campus, not even today. Especially not today. Consider who you might end up talking to.”

I can see that his first impulse is to tear away from me, but he manages to control himself.

“Shit!” He inhales deeply and runs his hand through his short curls. “It’s this confounded waiting! I can’t bear it anymore!”

“Yes, you can. Almost done now.”

“No, it’s not almost done, damn it! Three more hoops, and I can’t even—there’s nothing I can do, except help cover up a case of sexual assault!”

“I know. Come on, we’ll buy you a baked apple. That will take the smell away, and then you can have some horrible sausage.”

When Tim has had his baked mouthwash and we have provided ourselves with a German sausage for Tim and punch and a big pretzel for me, I ask conversationally, “Where’s Martin?”

“Don’t start, Anna. I may meet him later on. There’s no—”

“Hey, you two!” Erin and Yvonne slowly work their way toward us as if they were wading through a strong current. “Seen any graffiti?” Yvonne murmurs when she is close enough.

“Did you see the guards everywhere?” Tim exclaims. “Totally pointless! On a night like this, either no one will see you or everyone will see you!”

“You could have said that about Homecoming, too, and Family Weekend.” Erin takes my cup and tries the punch. “Mmm, this is nice. Yvonne, do you want some?”

I have done my best to push Selena and her graffiti habit to the very back of my conscience, and except for five minutes on Thursday—when I considered writing her an email with a cryptic message like Three strikes and you’re out!—I succeeded. That is my deal with myself: three strikes and I’ll report her.

And then what?

The dome of the Observatory looms ominously above the glittering décor and the flames dancing in the yard. How could he? How could Hornberger seduce a girl who he knew was emotionally unstable? Worse, how could he get her pregnant? But then he may not know that Selena is pregnant. I could well believe that she has kept her condition secret from him. Her vandalism and the graffiti, not to mention her self-destructive behavior, are probably a kind of safety valve to let off steam. The problem is that as her pregnancy progresses and as the noose around Hornberger’s neck tightens, the pressure on Selena rises. I can’t imagine what she is going to do next. What can she do, really? I must talk to someone about her. I must talk to her; it is as simple and as uncomfortable as that.

And there is another reason for the weights pulling at the nerves in my stomach. It is two weeks since I saw Giles. Haven’t even caught sight of him from afar, or heard his voice round a corner in the hallway. Maybe he is doing both of us a favor by avoiding me, but I long for him with an intensity that is made up in equal parts of hopelessness, desire and shame. I know I am doing the right thing by not giving in to this. I just wish that doing the right thing did not feel as if I had amputated a limb.

“Oh, there’re Eugenia and Vern—and they look awesome!”

Eugenia and her husband have come as a fashionable couple from a twenties jazz club, and they do look absolutely gorgeous. After we have all complimented each other on our get-ups, Eugenia grabs Tim’s wrist.

“But we should toast you for having survived the first round! Plain sailing, Tim, in case no one told you yet. Impressive work! Here’s to three more slam dunks!”

And for once Tim keeps quiet and just smiles and blushes with pleasure.

The more crowded and festive the occasion becomes, the lonelier I feel. I want to ask Tim whether Giles isn’t attending tonight, but I don’t dare. I’m worried he would see the state I am in. How can one absence be so conspicuous? Among hundreds of faces and voices, the bells, the torches, the crackling fires, the music, the speeches, the sketches, the singing—

And then I see Selena. In a severe dark gown with a hooped skirt and lace at the throat, she looks more striking than I have ever seen her. Jane Eyre, pregnant with Rochester’s child. Instead of fleeing the place when she found out that he was seducing her into sin, she stayed and became his whore. It occurs to me that the graffiti may not have been directed at Natalie at all, or maybe it meant both herself and Natalie. She is holding a mug of something, and she is there with a group of other graduate students, but like me, she seems to be isolated by her thoughts, and like me she is staring up at the dome.

“I don’t believe that man!”

Erin’s choked exclamation comes at precisely the same moment as Selena’s face, rigid and expressionless before, registers emotion. I only have to follow her horror-struck gaze to detect Hornberger among the crowd. We are not the only ones to have seen him; a murmur of surprise, perhaps of disapproval or outrage, runs through the air.

“You gotta hand it to him,” Tim says. “He’s not floored by adversity.”

Erin fumes. “How dare he?”

“Look, look at Demers!”

Graham Demers, our President, at one point in his life worked for a high-ranking management consulting group, so he is wise in the ways of the world and not easily fazed, but it doesn’t need a reader of micro-expressions to see how dismayed he is at Hornberger’s—evidently unscheduled—entrance. But the pièce de résistance is, no disrespect to her, the piece of ass accompanying him.

“Wow. Just wow,” Vernon Russell mutters, only to choke a cry of pain when his wife elbows him in the ribs.

“At least she’s more than half his age,” Yvonne says caustically.

The ravishing brunette on Hornberger’s arm is thirty-five, if she is a day. She looks as if she had been sown into the black gown that she is wearing, her shoulders and décolletage are immaculate, and her make-up and jewelry are just this side of expensively sluttish.

“She must be costing him a pretty penny,” states an English voice behind me.

“Giles!” Erin exclaims. “There you are! Gosh, you look—Ginny, doesn’t he look—”

“Wow,” Eugenia says, still annoyed at her husband. “Just wow!”

The women’s voluble response masks my own amazement. Giles Cleveland—who wore his college tie on Family Weekend, just to wave the flag—has come dressed up as a gentleman of the Old South. I am so stunned I can hardly look at him to take in the details, let alone look at his face. Buff-colored pantaloons, knee-high riding boots, and a dark green frock coat with brown-and-yellow-patterned vest, his hair brushed back from his forehead.

This is so unfair of him.

One hand disappears into the pocket of his pants; I can just see a strip of white shirt held together by golden cufflinks. It is a movement at the same time poignantly at odds with the formality of his suit and curiously expressive of what I perceive, after all, as a hint of self-consciousness.

“Where’s your Scarlett?” Erin asks, a little acidly. She looks very stylish in her Bloomsbury Group outfit, but now she seems to regret the sexually neurotic touch that comes with looking like Virginia Woolf or Ottoline Morrell.

“Mm, you know, I’ve gone off Scarlett,” Giles says. “I’m getting a bit old for those high-maintenance teenagers.”

“Would that were true of all our professors,” Eugenia mutters.

Partly to appear unimpressed, partly because I am suddenly anxious, I turn to check how Selena has reacted to Hornberger’s latest stunt. But Selena has disappeared.

“A good evening to you all!” Elizabeth slowly edges her bulk through the crowd. She is one of the few women who can carry off the layered look, and that is what she sticks to, probably wisely. “Now may not be the best moment, but when the outcry has died down, I want to take you, Tim, and you, Yvonne and Anna, to see the President. You’re here to mingle. Network, my dears, network. Let me have a drink first, then I’ll introduce you.”

“Do you think they’ll let Hornberger stay?” Tim asks. “Or will he be marched off campus by a posse of security guards?”

“Innocent until proven guilty.” Elizabeth shrugs. “It may well be his last Christmas at Ardrossan.”

“Anna!” Yvonne whispers to me when Elizabeth turns to talk to Erin, Eugenia, and Vernon. “If she is as outspoken as this about the matter, it must mean Hornberger is finished!”

After curtseying and listening prettily to all the anecdotes and jokes of the college worthies Elizabeth introduces me to, I join the procession of light around the campus, with a speech and a song at each significant spot. Later, and frozen through, I am recovering by the fire of one of the gingerbread stands with Tim and Martin, a wiry, shaven-headed sociologist who is very clearly the calm anchor in this relationship.

“I’m so bad at that,” I gripe. “Small talk with the VIPs! It’s going to break my precious little assistant-professorial neck that I’m crap at networking!”

“You’re not bad at it,” Tim points out. “You just think you are, because you hate it.”

“They weren’t listening to what you said. I can guarantee that,” Martin remarks, looking me up and down with an exaggerated leer. “Very sexy dress. Even on a woman.”

“Stop that!” Tim protests. “We can’t both flirt with Anna, and I saw her first!”

“Ah, but what neither of you boys has seen…” The punch must be working its dangerous effect on me, because I step behind a big trash can and quickly hitch up my skirt to display the lace top of my stocking.

“Oh, you brazen hussy.” Tim grins. “Anyway, don’t show us, show Giles.”

The name rushes into my blood vessels like a triple gin and tonic. My face must have registered my reaction, because Martin, more sensitive to embarrassment than Tim, clicks his tongue and tries to change the subject.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing my ass off out here. Will you come in and—”

“Hey, honey! Tim, hi! Lurking in the shadows?” Bernie emerges from the crowd, a glass in one hand and a woman’s purse in the other. “Not for nothing, guys, but this girl is wasted on you this evening.”

“Says the man who looks like Billy the Kid,” Tim shoots back, a little pissy.

Bernie takes this jibe at his expensive-looking cowboy outfit in good humor, admitting that Elvira had expressed doubts, too.

“You should have listened to her.”

“Why, you don’t like the rugged look?” He grins. “Anyway, Anna-Banana, before Elvira comes back, for old times’ sake—” He puts one arm around my taffeta shoulders and kisses me on the mouth before he struts off.

“You’re kissing the wrong man.” Tim glares at me through narrowed eyes.

“I didn’t kiss him at all!” I snap, indignantly.

“Never mind,” he relents. “Where is Giles? We need to get Elizabeth’s card signed.”

The spring semester starts on January fifteenth, Ma Mayfield’s fifty-fifth birthday, and some strategic thinker realized that we would never get a present sorted out and a card signed if we left it till then. He also bought a pint-sized crystal-and-sterling bottle, which he produces from a dark leather box in his office.

“And this is genuinely eighteenth-century?” Erin examines the sparkling piece in its velvet case.

“No, I got it from Sears for nineteen ninety-nine,” Giles says.

“Seriously, where did you get it? The Internet?” Eugenia straightens up from signing the card.

“London. I know a guy who sells that sort of thing. And no, it isn’t fenced goods!”

“‘Last week, mysteriously disappeared from the Duke of God-I’m-Posh’s billiard room, antique crystal to the value of—argh!’”

Giles grabs Tim by the neck and shakes him.

“Listen, son, don’t get fresh just because you’ve passed the first round of your tenure review!”

“My tutor in Cambridge collected this sort of stuff,” I tell them. “He wasn’t supposed to keep it in his office at all, because of insurance, but he did it anyway.”

“Tristan Millard was your tutor?” Giles asks, mildly interested. With the air of one humoring a precocious child, he picks a yellowing, slightly tattered booklet out from beneath the velvet bed and hands it to me to read. Despite ourselves, nerds that we are, we get involved in the topic and I only realize that the others left the room when Erin sticks her head through the half-open door.

“Tim, c’mon—the taxi’s here! Sorry, Giles, but I had to bribe the driver with the promise of an extra-large tip, so—Tim, now, please!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”

Tim grabs his coat and makes for the door before I can decently get up from that damned leather sofa. I was all right in Giles’s office on that sofa in my burgundy taffeta dress as long we were a crowd of six. I’m definitely not staying for a company of two, and since he has also gotten up from his chair, I’m assuming that we see eye to eye on this one.

“Bye, Giles! Bye-bye, love!” And Tim is out the door.

And I’m suddenly so shy with this man I’ve hardly been able to look at all evening because I don’t want to let him see the adoration glowing in my eyes.

“Yes, well, it’s a good thing we’ve got that sorted out. One item off the holiday list, I guess.” I glance round for my coat. “I think I’ll try my luck with the cabs, too, now.”

Then everything happens very fast. I’m reaching for the doorknob, and he is suddenly right behind me. One hand, left of me, slams against the door, the other, by my right shoulder, slams against the light switch and turns the key in the lock. Suddenly the pale glimmer from the electric bulbs in the garlands outside the windows is the only source of light, and it isn’t much. I wince at his unexpected physical violence, but not for a nanosecond am I afraid. His hand is on my waist, his fingers dig into my flesh; he spins me round, my shoulders and the back of my head bump against the door.

And then he kisses me. Giles Cleveland bends down from his great height to kiss me, and it is a big, wet, angry kiss, full of pent-up emotion. The fingers of his other hand slip round my neck, and I couldn’t avoid his mouth even if I wanted to.

“This is for letting that guy kiss you!” he growls above me in the dark.

“Bernie? But he isn’t—”

“And this one is for wearing lace stockings in my office!”

“How do you—” I gasp for breath when he finally releases my mouth.

“Well, you didn’t put them on for Tim and Martin.” The gaze from those light eyes exposes my most unacknowledged motives. “Did you, Anna?”

“N-No, but I—” His first fury spent, his kisses become, if anything, even more thorough, but now they are less of an assault. His objective is to turn me on, not to punish me, and now he is allowing me—daring me—to respond. I realize only hazily that he has clasped my thigh, pulled it up to his hip and pushed back the hem of my dress till his fingers reach the lace top of my stocking. He draws me against himself, not roughly now, but in a way that leaves no doubt that resistance would be futile.

I don’t resist him at all. With his fingers crooked around my knee he pulls me onto the smooth, hard slope of his thigh between my legs and rocks me gently back and forth, his other hand in the small of my back.

Although I could hate myself for it, it is the most deliciously sensual feeling, being in the hands of this angry, beautiful man who has set his mind on arousing me. His fingertips are on my naked flesh, high up on my thigh. He feels for me blindly, and my body is responding just as blindly to any touch, any movement of his. My good angel, a bedraggled little figure squatting on my right shoulder, warns me that we’ll be copulating on the floor in a couple of minutes if his fingers inch any higher. His other hand glides down to my ass, one of my ass cheeks fits comfortably into his hand, and there is a worrying inevitability in the way he yanks me against his rock-hard thigh. Oh, God—does he really mean to f*ck me now, here, in his office?

“Please, no, don’t—”

He cuts me short huskily. “Hold still.”

In delicious obedience I slip my arms round his neck as he hauls me up and against the length of his body. It’s like an electric shock running through me when it becomes very clear that his thigh is not the only part of his nether regions that is as hard as a rock. One of my legs is still wrapped around his hip; his probing fingers reach the edge of my panties and then, through the thin lace of my panties, his fingertips feel my soft, swollen flesh. And I want to die with desire and shame, I’m so wet for him. Now he knows how wet I am for him. This is so embarrassing—oh, God, this feels so good! My arms tighten around his neck and I press my face against his shoulder. He smells of expensive cloth, a little of rum punch and shaving cream, but the predominant fragrance is that of Giles himself, which I can’t define at all except that there is a hint of licorice in it and that it’s the loveliest smell I can imagine.

Still there is nothing frantic in our movements. We are dancing on a tightrope, in more senses than one, a supreme rush of adrenaline balanced by a supreme effort at control.

Suddenly he stops.

“Don’t do that…”

He lets go of my thigh and steps back from me. In a flash of shame and disappointment I take my hands off him. The anguish of finding myself rejected is so intense that tears shoot into my eyes. The moment seems to stretch out forever, but it can only have been a couple of seconds during which he looks down at me. Then he takes my hand and leads me over to the sofa.

“Giles—” I have no idea what to say. It’s just that I feel that I ought to say something. “We cannot go on doing this! It’s crazy!”

“It drives me crazy that I can’t touch you. And you’ll have to resist me harder if you really want me to stop.”

He kisses me again, slowly and deeply. Already his mouth is familiar, the way the tip of his tongue runs along the sensitive corners of my mouth, the way his lips soften against mine. Oh, the delight of a man who knows how to kiss! Both his hands clasp my butt again and drag my hips against his, and I’m no longer kidding myself. If he wants to f*ck me here, now, in his office, I won’t stop him.

He pushes the low table to one side with his shin and sinks onto the sofa, pulling me with him. I try to sit demurely with my feet on the floor, but he hooks his arm underneath my knees and lifts me right onto his lap, my legs along the length of the seat. The dim light from the Christmas festoon shines onto him, and my heart skips a beat. He looks radiant. I smooth the silver hair back from his forehead and marvel at the look of happiness on his face. Incredible as it may sound, he is as delighted with me as I am with him. We kiss and kiss; his hand slides up from my waist to my breast. With his thumb he chafes the hardening tip until I gasp.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” he whispers against my mouth. “But as you’re wearing those stockings…”

Then his hand is on my silken knee, caressing my thighs with a mixture of delight and confidence that is absolutely irresistible. Again his fingers glide across the lacy border between silk and skin, only this time they’re doing so on the inside of my leg, which is a dozen times more sensitive than the outside. For a while that’s where they remain, traveling along the lace edge from thigh to thigh.

“You’re not angry with me anymore?”

His fingers tighten on my flesh. “Don’t ask me that.”

“Giles, please…”

“I wish I could take you in the middle of Library Square,” he says, and I can hear his hurt in the hoarseness of his voice. “At midday, on a hot day in summer. So I could see your face, and the whole world could see your face, when you come for me!”

The back of his index finger runs over my lower lip, and I catch it between my teeth, bite and release.

“I don’t come for you, you arrogant male!”

“Yes, you do.” His fingertip returns to the danger zone on my lower lip, and I nibble at the pad of flesh, but gently. “I know very well that I can’t make you come.” He is watching my mouth, his eyes glistening. “If you’re willing, I can help. That’s all.”

His wry statement makes me laugh; I don’t know whether he is being coy or candid. “Mommy’s little helper.”

His eyes shoot up to mine. For a second or two he looks almost shocked; then his features soften.

“Kiss me again,” he whispers, and there is now a catch in his voice that tells me as much as the state of his cock that playtime is over. I kiss him without hesitation, and as our tongues meet, his fingers slip inside my panties and he finds me. My entire consciousness gathers in the pool of sensation between my legs; my whole self is at his fingertips as they inch across the fleshy mound and descend into the moist curls of hair. For perhaps a quarter of a minute he sits motionless, cupping me in his warm, large hand. Then one finger, the whole length of it, dips between the swollen, exquisitely sensitive lips. My hips pick up the rhythm and move against his hand.

“Like that?” he asks huskily.

“Y-Yes…” I cling to his body, lost in the waves of agonizing pleasure as his fingers stroke me with exactly the right pace and pressure.

“Lift your skirt.”

With my free hand, the one not wrapped around his neck, I hitch my dress up. The white shirt cuff and the dark cloth of his jacket mirror the pale skin of my thighs gleaming above each stocking top. I’ve spread my legs as far as my panties allow to give the gentle, skillful hand as much scope as possible. His golden cufflink flashes in the light shining in from the windows, and when he rubs his knuckles against the sopping flesh, his fingers glisten with moisture.

“This is the most erotic thing I have done in my entire life.” His voice is thick with passion, but also something else, something that sounds like awe. I look up to see whether I can have heard that right. My heart beats high in my throat, and it’s not just arousal. He looks at me, and we’re both so serious that I can hardly breathe.

“Keep moving,” he whispers.

I look down to watch my hips buck slowly against his hand, and so I see him adjust the angle of his wrist. Before my brain can process the significance of that movement, my body has already registered it as the ignition of thousands of nerve ends. His middle finger pushes deeply and effortlessly into me. I arch myself against him and bite on the cry of pleasure that is choking me. I feel him slip out and instinctively reach down and grab his wrist to make him stay with me.

“Up!” His hand is on my ass and he lifts me up to pull the damp bit of lace over my buttocks and down my legs. I kick and struggle until I can free one foot, and at once he spreads my legs wide, adds another finger to the first, and f*cks me with them—hard and deep. Even if I tried, I couldn’t keep silent. All I can do is to stifle my moans against the side of his face. My face, my whole body, feels feverish; I’m breaking into a hot sweat, and the determined career girl that still lurks somewhere in my mind asserts herself one last time in feeble protest.

“I’m…I’m getting you all wet!” I gasp, thinking of the pantaloons I’m sitting on, and his hand, covered up to the knuckles with the liquid evidence of my desire. He doesn’t even bother to answer that. His left arm, which had been clamping my shoulders to steady me in his onslaught, relaxes a little, but it’s only to vary the pace of his right hand between my legs. His arm around me tightens, and I sag against his shoulder and say goodbye to that earnest girl who wants to control everything. I don’t need her now, because Giles Cleveland is holding me, and he has everything under control…his mouth finds mine, and his tongue moves against mine with the same slow, languorous deliberation as his fingers, keeping me steady on a high plateau of arousal.

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

I arch my hips against his hand—that’s a rhetorical question if ever I heard one—but it’s no good, I need him to…

“…f*ck me again!”

And I mean it. I don’t care that we’re in his office, with a huge party going on around us, I need him to unbutton his pantaloons and come into me. But he smiles, slowly, a little mockingly, and drives his fingers into me, with a deep and upward thrust that reduces me to a shuddering heap. I sink completely into a trance-like state; there is nothing in the world now except his mouth and his hand.

“Ah! Oh, no!” I sit up, shocked to the core. “Oh, my God! What—what was that?”

What that was—when he slowed down, when his fingers almost slipped out of me—was that I ejaculated. I felt a hot, unfamiliar kind of release—not in my womb at all, just a brief, soft sense of suddenly melting, and although I didn’t see anything, the soft, innocent sound of droplets of fluid sprinkling the leather upholstery between my legs echoes in my ears as loudly as so many gunshots.

“Oh, God, I’m-I’m so sorry! Did I just—this has never happened to me before, I swear!”

“I’ll take that as a compliment then.”

“No, I’m—oh, you’re laughing at me? How can you laugh? I didn’t know this was going to happen! Oh, look, you’re—oh, this is all wet—oh, my God!”

“Hush!” His grip tightens; he draws me close. “Hush!” he commands. “Stop flapping!” Again I feel his body quiver with laughter. “Hush, now!”

He’s leaving me no choice but to be still, but in his embrace I’m still heaving with shame, and probably with the sheer physiological shock of suspended…rapture.

“Breathe! Breathe out!”

I obey. I concentrate on exhaling, and I calm down. Suddenly I’m exhausted to the marrow of my bones and afraid that I really will fall asleep. If only I could stay like this for ever. Sleep, and forget that I’ve squirted all over Giles Cleveland’s office. And his sofa. And his Ashley-Wilkes frock coat.

“All right?” he asks.

Dumbly, I shake my head.

“Look at me.”

I shake my head again.

“Look at me!” He holds me away from himself, and I force myself to raise my eyes to his face. He looks so bright and young and happy that I have to swallow a sob rising in my throat. “You beautiful idiot!” he says lowly. “Do you really not know how incredibly sexy that was?”

“No! No, I do not!”

We are silent, and as my body cools off, inevitably, the implications of the situation become overpowering. We have done it again. Will we go on doing it till we are caught again? Why am I hell-bent on ruining my career and making myself notorious for lewd behavior on campus? It seems that this, as the Comte de Valmont puts it, is Beyond My Control.

“Would you like me to call you a cab now?” he asks, his voice completely neutral.

“Yes, please.”

Giles has himself and the situation completely under control.

I pull my cold, wet panties back on and fix my stockings. I catch him watching me, still with a look of utter fascination.

“They work.”

“Where’s my…coat?”

He holds my coat for me and I step away from him the moment my arms are in the sleeves. And so I slink out of his office, along the dimly lit corridors out to the waiting taxis. Hardly anyone is around now. I have no idea what time it is. I ask the driver; it’s half past eleven.

When the taxi turns into the dark lane that leads up to the farm, it starts snowing. Thick, white picture-book flakes float down from a black sky. They dot the windshield and melt, they settle on the black fields to my left and the naked trees to my right. The world blurs; I realize how close I am to tears. It’s so beautiful and calm and still, and I’m such a complete mess. This is what I need, the still, cool simplicity of snow in the woods. Instead, I have to catch a plane to New York City in seven hours.