Chapter One
Meghan
Every Thursday morning at eleven the quiet buzzer goes off in the small waiting room and I go through the second door into Stella's office. She's my shrink. For the next fifty minutes I sit in her comfortable leather armchair and talk into space, sometimes barely aware of her sitting in a similar chair to my left. I rarely cry, rarely get that upset really. I just talk. Sometimes she'll ask a question or prompt me with a comment of some sort but, most of the time, I just talk. Most of the time it seems to bounce from talking about my father, who fucked me up, to talking about John. Dear departed John, who fucked me up even more than my father. Sometimes I talk about Elizabeth.
The theme is pretty much always the same. I have low self-esteem, believe myself corrupt, have an anger directed against two dead men and am sexually very ambivalent. Your standard young woman about town.
At eleven fifty, Stella interrupts, murmurs some assuring words, and stands to lead me to the other door, which leads to the corridor outside her office. By twelve-fifteen I'm seated in the restaurant, drink in hand, waiting on Rebecca, 'Bec' as I call her. I always have to wait on Bec. At twelve thirty-five she breezes in, pecks my cheek, plumps down, grabs the Chardonnay I'd ordered for her, takes a deep swig and exhales her usual "ahhh". She's fourteen years older than me and probably my best friend.
"So what was it today" she asks, "being fucked in the ass, sucking some black cock in an alleyway or eating strange pussy?"
I give her the bird. "Actually, I was talking about frustration."
"Shug," (for 'Sugar') "last week you never wanted to fuck again for ever and a day and now you're friggin' frustrated. C'mon."
"Fuck you ... I was talking about the fact that I can't confront either John or my father... and how angry that makes me feel, how I want to get even, to punish them in some way, but can't. That kind of frustration." I end lamely.
"Oh. Yeah, well I can relate, Shug. You know I can"
Then the waitress showed up and we turned to ordering and so changed topics. Later on, as we were waiting on the credit card slips to come back, Bec said, quite out of nowhere: "You know, if it was me, I'd give up all this therapy shit, find me a nice innocent boy, who was set for an apple-pie life, fuck him up, like you got fucked up, and leave him good and rotten. At least you'd get even with someone"
----------------------------------
That evening I called her, bullshitted for a while and then said: "remember what you said at lunch?"
"Shug, I'm a yammerer, I said lots of things. What in particular?"
"About finding an innocent and fucking him up."
"Yeah" she giggled, "yeah I did say that didn't I?"
"Well would you?"
"Really do it?"
"Yes."
She was silent for a couple of seconds but then said: "yeah, in your shoes, yeah I think I would. Yeah, now I think about, I like the idea. Let one of them suffer for a change."
"So who would you use?"
"Well, let's see. You'd want some kind of pure young thing that has no idea. Someone you can totally 'corrupt' to use one of your favoured words."
"I want to do it."
"Go girl". She said, with that 'admiration' drawl that she affected so well.
"So where the hell do you find an innocent in this town? They're all perverted, monomaniac bastards from puberty on"
She giggled, "let me think on it Shug."
Three days later she called me. "Shug, I think I've found you your lamb. Not quite as young as I was hoping for, but definitely an innocent. He's one of our auditors, an accountant. Probably early twenties but reaaaaaly straitlaced. We're talking bible-belt virginal here."
Jeremy
My daily habit is to leave my apartment at seven fifteen and walk two blocks to the coffee bar. I always get a skim cappuccino and a blueberry muffin. I take my iPad and read the online version of The New York Times and a couple of articles in The Economist, just like Mr. Stevens said I should. At eight twenty I walk back to my apartment, get my car from the garage and drive to work to be at my desk by eight fifty. This is my routine, my habit. I like habits; they help regulate my life and keep me on the path of Christlikeness.
The coffee bar is not Starbucks slick but rather, I guess, latter-day hippy. Occupying the ground floor of an old house it leans to odd chairs and swaybacked sofas on uneven wooden floors with far-eastern looking rugs and cushions and many odd corners. One sees the same faces. Grad students in walking boots, working-men with real boots, women in sandals and the odd suit. That's me: the odd suit.
I always try to sit in one dim corner, somewhat tucked away, that puts my back to the wall and gives me a view of the main room, where the barista plies her trade. Sometimes, the other seat in that corner, which is about ten feet from my preferred perch, is taken and, sometimes, not. That day, it was.
I noticed her of course, as one does. Nothing particularly struck me, she was a woman, maybe ten years older than me, sitting with the local paper held up in front of her, which she briefly lowered to appraise me. We nodded at one another, which I managed to do without blushing, and she raised her paper and got on with her reading. I hit my New York Times app, crumbled my muffin, took a sip of my cappuccino and settled in.
After five or ten minutes, I heard her paper move and looked up as she crossed her legs, the paper still concealing most of her upper half. I saw how brief her skirt was and how tanned her legs. As I looked, she wriggled on her chair and her skirt rode up on the thighs. The skirt was too brief; one could now see the very top of her thighs but, as the leg nearest me was on top of the other, that was all one could see. I felt a slight frisson of excitement. As I looked, hoping she'd move again, she did. She lowered the paper to turn the page and looked right at me as she did so. Caught, I blushed and hastily looked back at the iPad. She raised the paper again and, after a second or two, crossed her legs again. This time I knew that I'd seen pubic hair.
I could feel my heart speeding up. This was the first time I'd seen pubic hair since I was a kid, when I saw one of my sisters changing at the beach. Seeing it like this, voyeuristically, created, for me, a huge erotic overtone. I had to cross my own legs to try and quell my growing erection even as I gazed at the tantalus and thus pumped even more blood into that independently-minded penis. All that stuff we'd had drummed into us about maintaining our character for Jesus Christ through self-control, just vanished.
We stayed like this for what seemed minutes, but was probably seconds, before she once again flounced her paper and, this time, folded it up and put it on the table next to her. I studiously avoided her eyes but could feel the heat in my face. She stood, gathered her bag, abandoned her paper and walked from her seat.
She stopped in front of me and waited for me to look up at her before saying, quietly: "were you looking at me?" My face got redder and my throat was too dry to speak so I looked at her for a couple of beats before, mutely, nodding my head.
"What did you see?" She said, even quieter. I swallowed, blushed more and, not looking at her, said: "your legs."
"That's all?"
"The top of your legs" I murmured, still avoiding her eyes.
"And what did you see at the top of my legs?" She whispered.
I couldn't answer her. I swallowed and tried to say something but just couldn't do it. I think I must have looked something like an out-of-water fish gulping for air.
