Angela White sat in an expansive business class seat just ahead of the Boeing 777's wing, and having passed on the heavy meal and taken only a few sips of water after take-off, had dropped off into an anxiously light sleep as the jet made it's way westward across the Atlantic. Being an employee of British Airways, she had managed to get a vacant seat that would allow her to sleep comfortably and deplane rapidly. She had brought along only a small rolling carry-on, the standard BA issue for Flight Attendants, and a handbag. She planned on staying in Boston this Friday night, all day Saturday, and return to London on the Sunday evening flight. She did not, however, have to be back at work for a fortnight.
She had met Sumner Welles only last Sunday, and only briefly when she had checked him in for the late morning flight to Boston, but she had been shocked and embarrassed by her transparent attraction to him. And all the more so when she had briefly held his hand over the check-in counter at Heathrow Terminal 3, and he had handed her his card, and asked her to, in effect, come to Boston and visit him. But what had shocked her the most, when she looked back on the incident later that day, was how she so readily assented to his invitation. 'How about next weekend' she had blurted out in the almost hypnotic adolescent state she was in when she had looked into those eyes. She had never seen anything like those eyes before in her life!
And then he had said practically the same thing to her - that he thought her eyes - well, special was the only word she could recall. Then she had melted into a puddle of pubescent joy, and gone completely bubble-headed as he walked off to his flight. But as that day had passed, doubts intruded on the spell he had cast, and she had resolved not to carry on with the affair any further.
And then Sumner had called. From flight 481! And what was all that nonsense about getting her telephone number from Santa Claus or the Prime Minister's office! But when all was said and done . . .
. . . He had said that he wanted her, wanted her to come to Boston, and that while he couldn't put his finger on just what had passed between them, he thought their mutual attraction important enough to risk being thought a total fool by her, that he wanted her to know where he stood, where his heart was coming from. And he had,
thankfully
, repeated his assertion that he was lousy at talking on the telephone! They had talked for several more minutes, and it had been
easy
to talk to him, it felt
natural
to talk to him, and he had
actually
listened to what she'd had to say for a change . . . not like the typical football types that haunted the nightspots and pubs around London. He seemed different.
Magnetically
so.
And then she'd emailed him - probably while he was still airborne - and she'd repeated what they had said on the telephone only minutes before. She had ended that first email with a simple assertion: she said that ever since meeting him earlier that day, while holding his hand in her heart in the hours since, she had simply gone weak in the knees at the very thought of him. Writing that - seeing those words on the screen of her little white iBook - had taken her by surprise. It took seeing that sentence on the screen to make all of the feelings she had encountered that day resolve into some kind of sense. Her finger had hovered over the 'Send' button for a few moments - as she pondered the import of those words to her, and, perhaps, to him - then she had sent her feelings winging into binary code to emerge on the far side of the ocean. To finish their journey in the eyes of a man she didn't know, but all of a sudden felt like she had known all her life.
+
Nancy Greenbaum had left Sumner Welles at the Harvard Square T station, and she was in a huff! Her three weeks on the trip to Scotland in such close proximity to him, and her instant attraction to him, had been an overwhelming experience for her. She had always been a stranger in a strange land, a Jew swimming in a Gentile sea, the culture of 'Generica' an ever present reminder to her of everything that could go wrong in a democratic society, and had. America was, to her, the homogenized land of Wal-Mart and MacDonald's, of movies extolling the virtues of non-conformity by conforming to the arbitrary dictates of fad and manufactured illusion. America was a culture that worshiped violence as
the
way to settle conflict - any conflict, then it's
peace loving
citizenry paraded to churches and proclaimed that Jesus was the way and the light. Amerika - as she now spelled out the name - had become
the
land of hypocrisy and warped values. And Sumner should very well have personified all she loathed about her country; he could very well someday be it's
King
.
Her parents had provided her with a comfortable - though still very Jewish - home to grow and come of age in. But, both her parents being physicians, they became a distant force in her life as she reached adolescence, and she had grown up - in the truest sense - in an exclusive New England boarding school. But her father always had been - and perhaps always would be - the dominant factor in her life. When she had a problem, he was the one she turned to, he would be there with love in his heart, and no strings attached.
Over the course of her high school years, Nancy had become increasingly more liberal politically, and she soon grew to detest the rich, young, and often mean-spirited boys she was in school with. They were anti-father figures to her - men she would never trust, boys, really, who loved to play games and shred hearts. Many of her teachers had been lesbians, and one had seduced her, and introduced her to the feelings and experiences of intimate love and trust for the first time in her 'adult' life. She had, as so many girls in America had in the 90s, fallen in love with the antiestablishmentarian non-conformity of the lesbian lifestyle. Would she have been able to appreciate the irony of her conformity had time been kinder to her?
And then she had met Sumner Welles. She had been attracted to him, though she couldn't understand why. He was the antithesis of everything she had come to value over the past four years, and yet the more she was around him, the more she listened to him, the more convinced she became that he represented the one true course of her destiny. She had listened with her heart as he had thanked her for her friendship after they had talked on the flight home from London. He had agonized about that Westhoven woman a little bit, and how she had tried to seduce him, and that had made Nancy more angry than mere words could describe. The more Sumner had talked to her, the more she became convinced that
he
loved her. Almost as much as
she
loved him, she thought now.
The irony of her feelings - that the utter gentility of Sumner Welles and the air of monied aristocracy that surrounded him would have wounded her very Jewish parents to their core - never seemed to enter her consciousness. The fact that this Westhoven woman had humiliated him, well, too bad for her. She planned to take care of that . . .
Nancy Greenbaum had watched as Sumner had talked to the Westhoven woman on the plane as she had disembarked. She had waited near the jetway exit then followed her to baggage claim, and on to the line to get a taxi. She had entered the line behind her, struck up a conversation with the writer, mentioned that she knew Sumner Welles. With that, the woman's interest had picked up, and she had offered to take Nancy into town. They had struck up an increasingly friendly conversation, and gone to dinner together. Nancy knew that this Westhoven woman was a sexual predator, and she wondered how Diane would respond to being the prey. Nancy had begun to seduce her at dinner that first night, and she could feel the Westhoven womans interest pick up as the evening progressed.
They had taken a taxi together to Nancy's little apartment over by the Museum of Fine Arts, and Nancy had invited her up. Almost as soon as the door had closed behind them, Diane had fallen into Nancy's arms and into a heated embrace. Nancy had moved her hands between the woman's legs, and thrilled when she felt stockings and garters, and no panties. Diane had been wet down there, and ready; Nancy had drifted down on her knees and thrust her tongue between the older woman's legs and assaulted her clitoris.
After Diane had gone weak in the knees, Nancy had pulled her to the floor, then sat astride
her
face. She had ground her now soaking crotch on Diane's face until she had cum and cum again. Nancy had assumed - quite unknown to her - a very dominant place in Diane's scheme of things. Diane had shattered in the course of the evening - turning from dominance in the wake of Sumner Welles' visceral unmasking - and she had fallen into the, for her, uncharted waters of submission.
Then Nancy had tossed her out of the apartment with a cruel, almost mocking manner, and Diane had walked out into the night.
But Nancy had called Diane almost every day since their return from London; and she kept baiting her trap. She read most of her Westhoven's books that week, and knew the woman be her words - her needs, wants, and desires - that were poured out on the pages like the ravings of a tormented soul. Nancy had intuited that Westhoven's weakness was simply an inability to commit to love; this she had learned simply by examining Westhoven's many heroine's ultimate dissatisfaction with the hollow affairs described in each of the books, and these affairs seemed quite obviously to Nancy simple permutations of Westhoven's real life sexual encounters. What a hollow wreck this woman was. Nancy began to understand Westhoven better through the week as she read her works, and Nancy found herself being drawn to Diane in a very unexpected way.
As Nancy drew closer to the Westhoven woman, she confirmed that the writer still had designs on Sumner. So Nancy had resolved to intervene. Her own feelings and emotions clouded the landscape of her designs; confusion reigned supreme here.
Nancy had
resolved
that this was
one
affair Diane Westhoven would
never
write about.
