Prologue
The Real Estate Office was my father's business long before it was mine. In fact, I had little interest in it, beyond the obligatory summers between school terms when I helped around the office to earn extra money
I spent my early teen years playing baseball, swimming in the Bay or devouring sports novels from the Book Mobile which came down our street weekly. Later, I would acquire a chemistry set (one of several) with which I made black powder and ignited on my workbench. The sulfurous smoke pouring forth from my workbench soon filled our small house and brought the terror of fire to my mother.
Black powder experiments were banished from the house and I began making rockets to launch into the Bay, using spent shotgun shells as the rocket body and mixing the sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate in a homemade powder mill, where steel ball bearings and the rotating mill ground the power into a fine mixture.
In High School I read Classic books along with an occasional spicy novel (tame by today's standards), played baseball on the High School team and was generally bored in school until Algebra came along. Afterwards, I was hooked on mathematics, later on Physics also. I painstakingly wrote the equations of motions for an electron rotating around a nucleus and spent even more time transferring these equations onto stiff manila colored art paper for display.
In hindsight I neglected the well-known effect of a rotating charge which by constantly accelerating radiated light, lost energy and quickly crashed into the nucleus. The math was correct; the physics wrong. None of the Science Fair judges commented on this fault and I won some kind of prize, undeserved in my mind when I later discovered my mistake.
A few of my high school teachers inspired me. The algebra and calculus teacher impressed all of us with long, elaborate calculations which filled the blackboards, finally producing an answer just before running out of room to write. He also terrorized us occasionally by loud and stern tirades when we neglected to study.
An English teacher seemingly spent more time correcting some of my sentence diagrams than I did doing them in the first place, took personal interest in us and even took some of us to a concert at a College two hours away. He shamed me with his genuine interest in our learning experience. Somehow, I managed to take three years of Latin without learning anything, so the inspiration was spotty and insufficient to carry over into all my classes.
I went off to attend the State University and chose a major in Physics. When I somehow became convinced that one had to be a genius to do serious work in physics, I switched to Electrical Engineering and obtained a BSEE degree. I switched back to math and physics in graduate school and was anticipating an academic career when my father suffered a debilitating heart attack and I returned to East Witch to take over the family Real Estate business... at least for a short term.
My mother showed little interest in the business, however, and the short term turned into a career, and not the one I had planned either. I married my wife Annie somewhat late...at the age of 25 and we settled quickly into the easiest, most natural experience of my life. I could not imagine such contentment with anyone else. Then, Turq came into my life, only to leave for reasons I won't yet reveal. These are my thoughts from my letters to her after we finally parted.
Chapter 1
I hired you to help out in my office. When I interviewed you, you had a cute, somewhat nerdy look with those glasses and I thought you might be good with cameras and computers. I operate a Realty Office where such skills are handy. My wife had been urging me for months to hire someone so I could spend more time at home.
You were very good helping around the office, but I began to notice your tight jeans and perky breasts beneath your shirt. Still, you had an innocent almost bookish look so I let you go about your work undisturbed. Since we were together so often, I began to like you a lot. I started wondering about your personal life. Does she have a boyfriend, I wondered...maybe a girlfriend...hmmm maybe both but certainly there must be someone, because you were so attractive and went so far out of your way to help people on the phone and in the office. You were, in fact, a little shy and I began wondering if you were still a virgin? Could that be possible, I thought? It was certainly none of my business. One day you were late coming in and seemed a little rushed. I wondered if you had spent the night with someone and had slept too late. It's none of my business I realized and tried to repress such thoughts.
But trying not to think of you made it even worse. Damn it, I thought. I'm glad my wife cannot read my mind. That made my condition even worse than before. I had not done anything wrong and already I was worrying about my wife finding out. What the hell is wrong with me? I am a grown man and I am having fantasies about this girl. The jeans you often wore started it. Your little butt looked so good with those pants stretched tight across it...so round and firm with a narrow waist accenting your shape. Your work didn't help either. You had to search file cabinets, sometimes bending over. If your back was toward me, I looked at your perfect little bottom...so inviting. If you were facing me, I sometimes saw your pants stretched tight between your legs and this little "V" area began to attract my attention. I wondered what kind of panties you wore...what color. Once you wore a skirt and I'm positive I got a glimpse of your panties when you sat on the floor to look thru some files.
Now, to say I was obsessed with you would have been misleading. You were a welcome asset to the office and I certainly enjoyed watching you from time to time. Smitten is a better word; our relationship was friendly but I was older than you. Knowing that younger women often did not have the maturity to keep emotional balance, I did not want to threaten my marriage with an affair that might grow out of control.
I noticed your people skills quite early. You were invariably polite to customers and went out of your way to help people, especially the young couples looking for their first house. I began to give you extra work, such as driving around taking pictures of newly listed properties. You bounced in and out of the office during the day like a kid, always with a smile on your face, lugging your camera over your shoulder and smiling goodbyes at everyone.
Freed from the duty of taking my own property pictures, I was able to keep up with my work. You kind of bopped into the office in the mornings, did the needed paperwork and bopped out again, but always with that quick smile and a "see ya later" wave as you lugged this large bag thru the door, always banging it with your shoulder to open it. You were like a sprite, a Peter Pan of a girl. You wore jeans almost exclusively then because of your outside duties and often my only memory of you was this small young lady, that enormous camera bag and a cute little ass flitting out. Weeks passed in this way without incident.
It was a sunny fall day and I had just finished my coffee at a local diner when I caught a glimpse of you across the street. At first, I thought you were a boy, because your jacket was something a boy might wear, like a plaid or maybe a flannel quilted shirt and with a knit hat pulled down to your ears. Your pants gave you away. Boys don't have butts like that. I paid the bill quickly and stepped out into the chilly air in time to see you duck into a Homeless Shelter down the street. Now I admit to curiosity as to why you were there, so I found a bench at a nearby bus stop, sat down and waited. The fall sun was low in the sky and the air nippy. I pulled the collar of my coat up high on my neck, put my hands in the coat pockets and sat there waiting. I didn't wait long, maybe ten minutes, when I saw you leave, walking away from my direction and soon turning a corner, you were gone.
Blowing yellow and red leaves hit me as I hurried across the street and entered the Shelter, a blast of warm humid air, the smell of soup and stale bodies greeting me. Approximately six people were seated at long tables, spooning soup into their mouths, only one or two barely looking up as I passed their tables. The tables were covered with Formica of a faded yellow and the chairs were the metal folding kind, often found in schools and churches, painted grey or brown... not an attractive place to eat, but the soup smelled good. A young black man was loading dishes into a washer in the back and I went up to the only other person not seated and eating soup. I learned from him that you came in every couple of weeks and gave the customers cash from your own pocket, usually about fifty dollars and then you left.
I was puzzled. Why would you give perfect strangers money, I wondered?
Evidently, you had done it before. Charity of course, but most people are satisfied to write a check to a Charity or drop change into a kettle. But you did it personally and it was this difference that caused me to think there was a layer of personality beneath what I had seen. I wanted to know more and it was this intent to know more about you that started changing our relationship forever.
On the following Monday the trap was sprung, not knowingly by my hand though and certainly not by yours. Those people who believe in fate would ascribe events that followed as inevitable clockwork of an unknown force. Romantics would point to Cupid and his gentle arrow of innocent passion. I believe we each had a hand in setting the trap, unknowing of the consequences and for our own reasons. Each trap by itself was of little importance in the events that followed, but together we moved our relationship forward and small events combined to seal us together.
For my part I blame sexual attraction first, the lure a young woman has to an older man. Nature is to blame for this. She turns a young girl into a sexual woman attractive to all men, young and old alike to ensure species survival. So, I don't apologize for watching you. I took joy in it. I watched your quick smile, sometimes catching my breath as its sudden light flashed and hit me in the chest. I watched your grace as you moved around the office, balancing files in your arms as you closed a drawer with one foot, a wooden pencil often held between your teeth, movements that only a young woman can make.
I watched your body, a shirt stretched tight across your breasts so pert as you leaned backwards. I watched your bottom as it moved beneath your jeans in a simple walk, a natural sway to your hips, causing your round little cheeks to move so enticingly that I had to stop what I was doing and watch. I watched your face for its girlish, unconscious animations and smiled at nature's trick which made you so appealing. Your somewhat nerdy appearance combined with your habit of wearing flannel shirts gave you a tomboy look, belied by your physical attractions. I watched your generosity as you helped everyone in the office, often volunteering to fetch lunch from a local carryout even in bad weather. In truth, I watched you a lot as the trap sat somewhere in my mind, precariously balanced.
For your part I can still only speculate. I imagined your boyfriends as fumbling, lustful and possessive in their youth, too immature to fathom your special needs. I imagined your girlfriends, if you had any, as timid and uncertain in their sexuality, flighty and overly dramatic. I imagined you as wanting the experience, stability and maturity of a man, wanting to know your innermost thoughts, feelings and ambitions. I speculated a lot of things. With hindsight I know now that your trap was also just balanced, waiting to trip. I could never have predicted the course we were to follow.
I was late getting to work. As my car rolled into the parking lot, I saw your little jeep, already parked a little crooked in its space. My heart skipped a beat and I caught my breath. Whoa, I thought to myself. What is going on here? Emotion flooded my chest and I found myself nervous suddenly. Now, this was something I had not experienced for years. I was as if a giant hand reached down and squeezed me with its fingers. I was momentarily scared I was having a heart attack. I can imagine you smiling as you read this and of course there was no heart attack. I sat there unwilling to move.
When I did, it was with unsteady legs as I entered the office. Now, if you think this was the springing of the trap, let me remind you of what happened next. And don't pretend you don't remember because we talked about it weeks later. This moment was not the springing of the trap but a mere warning rumble of a coming earthquake.
