Through the Tunnel

The long wooden bench along the platform would have been empty if not for the fair-skinned figure seated at its very end. In fact, the entire platform would have been empty.

Every time she looked around at the vacant space surrounding her, she'd immediately double-check her ticket to reconfirm: yes, she was in the right place. The next train due to arrive was the outbound overnight train, which, yes, she held a ticket for. None of the other travelers had seen fit to arrive so early.

As other passengers began to filter in, the anxious need to check the ticket faded and in its place, she started absent-mindedly pulling a strand of her dirty blonde hair taut with one hand. With the other, she would press the strand between her forefinger and thumb and run them together along its full length, until they bumped into her other hand, at which point she'd squint critically at the fanned ends of the strand for a moment before dropping the length of hair and picking up the ticket again. The train eventually pulled up; the conductor began helping people board; she gathered up her backpack, got on, and chose herself a sleeper cabin in the middle of the car. She took one of the upper bunks, pulled out a book, and prepared to let the time unwind until departure. It would be a while yet before things got underway.

As she got settled, another traveler was making her way through the station towards the train, a woman of the very same height, very same build, darker complexion. She worked through the narrow corridor of the car, trailing a neatly packed rolling suitcase, pausing with pursed lips for the occasional passenger blocking the way as they moved their bags into a cabin, until she came to a stop at this very same cabin, which looked empty to her at first.

She stood in the doorway. In the darker interior, a young woman looked up from her book. They made momentary eye contact. She took out her phone and sent a brief message to someone, waited a second, and read a reply that made her purse her lips more firmly than the obstacles in the hallway had. She stashed her suitcase and took a seat on the lower bunk opposite, crossed her arms, and began a vigil over the doorway.

This state of affairs lasted all of a couple of minutes, before her toe began tapping the floor in a steady, impatient rhythm.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

It was incredibly distracting.

"I'm sorry, but do you mind?"

The tapping came to an instant halt.

"Sorry." A second later, she offered by way of explanation: "I'm usually the first."

"The first?" The book was set aside.

"The first in the cabin. I'm usually early. You beat me."

"I left a lot of extra time. I wanted to make sure I was in the right spot."

"You don't usually take this train?"

"I don't usually take any train."

"Where are you from?"

She was, as the other woman had immediately suspected, an American. Her fellow traveler was from a small village, by way of her central country's drab capital.

"Your English is practically flawless. Where did you learn it?"

She had had to study it in school. The rest came from movies and television shows.

"I'm Mara." She raised her hand to the first woman, who draped her hand in hers in a delicate handshake from above.

"Katie."

"What brought you over here?"

Katie found herself here, in the middle of gothic cathedrals and Old World cafes, by reason of schooling. She was studying abroad for the summer. In her highly specialized field, there were a handful of programs worldwide, and she had applied to this one, not seriously expecting that she would be accepted; but she was. She had spent several weeks scrambling to keep up with the coursework. In overreacting to the initial workload, she surprised herself by getting ahead of the material for the first time this week. She could, if only for the weekend, relax a bit. She decided to parlay this window of unfamiliar freedom into an opportunity to get out and experience more of the continent. Train was the only realistic option - flying would have been too expensive.

"You take this train a lot?"

"It's my milk run."

"The map was a little confusing. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to get off."

"Do you have your ticket handy?"

Did she. She handed it to Mara, who gave it a quick look.

"Where are you trying to get to?"

Katie described the general location of the hostel she was aiming for.

"You want stanice centrale. That's my stop as well. You'll get off with me."

She exhaled a relieved "thank you" as she took the ticket back. One less worry, one less thing to go wrong.

"Why did you get here so early?"

"I prefer it. It's easier for me to relax and enjoy the trip if I'm here and I know I'm going to make my connection."

"When I caught my flight at the beginning of the summer," Katie shared, in the reassuring, confessional tone of someone divulging a shared weakness, "I got to the airport three hours early. I didn't want to miss my flight."

They were both silent for a bit. "You know, you didn't seem relaxed when you got here."

Not everyone in her party shared her point of view.

She was traveling with her longtime boyfriend, with whom she was running a coffee shop in the city of their destination. His name was Gianni. They were headed back after a quick visit home for her.

"'What-a-deefference does it make?' she mugged in a faux accent and baritone, 'As long as we get to the destee-nation, what do I need to sit and wait in the train for? It is-a just a waste of time.'"

After a pause, "You know - typical guy. Only sees things his way."

"Yeah, so selfish," Katie offered supportively.

"I shouldn't complain," Mara gently corrected herself, "It's just boyfriend and girlfriend stuff. He's a stand-up guy."

"How did you two meet?"

"Through work. He came through town while traveling on business. How about you? Did you leave someone broken-hearted over there" she tilted her head in the general direction of the Americas, but wound up nodding east, "when you left for the summer?"

Pause. "No," she said quietly.

"Better that way. Not tied down. You're a free woman." She arched an eyebrow. "You hook up with anyone since you've been here?"

Katie shook her head.

"Really?"

"Too busy with classes."

"You're a better woman than I. God, when I used to travel... Something about being away from home. Everything just seems a little more...I don't know, romantic." A far off look crossed her face. It passed; she resumed. "How long have you been over here?"

"A little over a month."

"A month." She rolled the 'nth' over her tongue, like someone tasting a fine wine, carefully considering the length of time and all the activities it could encompass. "And in that entire time you haven't been tempted? There hasn't been even one guy who made you think, 'I'm young. I'm overseas. Why not?'"

Long pause.

"No, it's just not my thing."

"What isn't?"

"Chasing after guys. Getting chased after."

"You don't get hit on all the time? The men here are really persistent."

"No. I don't think men find me very interesting." Her tone was flat; the statement, accompanied by the slightest shrug of the shoulders.

Mara looked Katie up and down, gave her a proper going over. She appraised her, like a man, from head to toe: sweet face, kind eyes, perfectly round breasts, tight ass. Her verdict: "She can't be right."

She began following a train of thought that quickly picked up a full head of steam: "She must be getting approached all the time." She was that particular paradox: sweetly innocent and scorchingly hot all at once. Men wouldn't merely find her attractive. They wouldn't merely lust after her the way they do after a more obviously sexual woman. Oh, no, they would be drawn to her, unable to resist the prospect of seeing that fresh face in the throes of ecstasy, to be the one to witness the delicious juxtaposition of demure innocence with wanton fervor, like a secret treasure only they can unlock.

Mara snapped to as she realized she was pulling that thread perhaps a bit too taut. She shook her head. "Not possible. Trust me. You are exactly the kind of girl guys are interested in."

"Well, they aren't. They've never been interested. I'm a bookworm. I study all the time. Guys don't want to be with a geeky girl who spends most of her time on her obscure major."

"Have you ever had a boyfriend?"

"Not really."

"Have you ever been with a guy?"

The question made her literally squirm, turning her shoulders to one side, craning her neck away as she took a deep breath, palms flat on the surface of her seat. Mara had to strain to make out the motion that followed: Katie was shaking her head.

There was one more obvious question to ask, to remove all doubt. Mara took a reverential pause, like a scientist on the cusp of documenting, for the first time, a species heretofore unknown to man.

"Katie, are you a virgin?"

Still looking away, still patently uncomfortable, she nodded.

"Wow. How could that be?" She didn't mean to say it. So stunned was she, it came out spontaneously, the thought migrating un-commanded from her mind to her mouth.

"The opportunity hasn't really presented itself."

It was mostly true. She had spent her high school years doing practically nothing but studying. Her parents reminded her, almost on a daily basis, that the competition to get into college was getting stiffer by the second. Everyone knew you had to get at least a bachelors degree to make a living, they'd tell her, and her fellow classmates didn't care what it took to do it: the effort now, the staggering piles of debt later. For her and what she hoped to pursue, there was no margin for error. Of the small handful of schools even offering her intended field of study, there was really only one she could afford that was worth attending.

And since starting said college, she had been under the gun from day one to win her way into the right graduate program just to have a prayer of landing a job after it was all said and done. It left precious little time for anything else.

"You haven't had any time at all? I mean, all work and no play..."

Katie called a halt to the questioning. "I'm really not comfortable talking about this." For good measure, she continued defensively, "I don't have to have time for fooling around with guys. There are plenty more important things in the world."

"I'm sorry. You're right. I didn't mean to make you feel bad. I'll mind my own business. Sorry."

Katie returned to her book. Mara went back to staring at the still vacant doorway.

Of the millions upon billions of casual conversations between the people that fortune seats next to one another on planes and trains and buses, almost all will lead nowhere. A question about your neighbor's tattoo leads to chit chat about their work in a tattoo parlor, but it's just idle curiosity that ends when you've exhausted all of the surface-deep insights that appeal to you about their work. Where's the craziest place you've ever given someone a tattoo? Oh, really, wow.

See - you, with the unadorned skin of both arms - you don't really have all that much in common with your seatmate. And neither, it seemed, did Katie and Mara.

Until half a minute later when the words descended from the upper berth. "Doesn't it hurt?"

In the time it took Mara to look up, orient herself to the abrupt about-face, realize what might hurt, and formulate a response, Katie had already reconsidered.

"On second thought, don't answer that. Forget I said anything."

"No, it's okay. I don't mind. It doesn't hurt."

"Really?"

Mara reached over and slid the cabin door shut. She climbed up to the upper bunk directly across from Katie. "Well, most of the time," she continued, "If you do it right. And sometimes it hurts a little. It can be nice when it hurts. It's a fine line between pleasure and pain. Ecstasy becomes agony until it becomes release, which is all the sweeter the longer it is delayed."

"OK, I'm sorry I asked."

"Why?"

"It's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed I said anything."

"It's not embarrassing. It's interesting. My girlfriends and me, we talk about this sort of thing all the time."

"It's not something I talk about. I've never talked about it. I can't believe we're having this conversation."

"Why?"

"It's...it's private."

"For you guys maybe. It's either like this private shame or prize of self-worth, but over here it's just a part of life. We all do it."

"I don't."

"You will someday. How old are you?"

She was roughly the same age, in between her third and fourth years of college, well beyond the age of majority and almost old enough to drink, even in the States.

"Go ahead, ask me anything."

"Oh, okay, where's the craziest place you ever did it?" Katie deadpanned, not expecting an answer.

It was at a concert. A guy had asked her out to catch one of her favorite groups. Halfway through the show, he held her from behind as they swayed in tandem to the music. He nuzzled her neck, eliciting a familiar rise deep within her. She turned to him, and he kissed her. With her lips pressed to his so softly and her ears filled with the sounds of a song she loved, they melted into each other. They moved into the recesses of the venue and, hidden only by the shadows, he propped her against a concrete column, pulled her panties to the side, and fucked her.

"What?" Mara stopped. Katie's face wore a slack-jawed look of utter shock. Mara had decided we're all adults here and it would be for the best that sensibilities not be spared. Where had the story pushed her over? Somewhere between "panties" and "fucked."

"I didn't think you'd actually answer that!"

"I told you - it's no big deal." Mara's tone was perfectly calm, nonchalant. "Everyone does it."

"Pretty sure not everyone does that. What if someone caught you?"

No one had. Even if they had, they were mostly fully clothed. They could simply disengage and act like nothing was going on. He had barely liberated his erect member from his jeans and pressed it up under her skirt, lifted her (he was so strong), slowly pulled her onto him, and slid her all the way up and down his full length over and over again. It was made all the more intense by the fact that he couldn't just pound away - they ground together slowly and silently, her eyes locked on his, her legs wrapped around his back, their bodies pressed between the point where her fingers interlaced behind his neck, the spot where her back met the wall and the place where his hands firmly gripped her hips.

"We didn't get caught." Mara bit her lip and simultaneously smiled the most self-satisfied smile. "In fact, we finished!"

"I could never."

"Why not?"

"It's so gross."

"What's gross about it?"

"So messy. It's like having the worst runny nose."

Mara crinkled her lips and knitted her brow, bewildered by a comparison she would never have thought to make. "It's not like that at all. It's a wonderful thing. It means I'm comfortable with him and I'm in the moment."

"Wouldn't you be worried about the smell?"

"Katie, seriously. It wouldn't have even occurred to me until just now. There's nothing bad about it. It's natural and subtle. Wait." Mara stopped. "How do you even know enough to be worried about any of this? I thought you'd never done anything."

"I didn't say I hadn't done anything. I said I was a virgin. There was one boy..."

There was one boy, one shy, quiet, brown-haired boy who worked up the nerve to ask her out her senior year of high school. He was the first boy who'd ever noticed her.

She had spent those years intentionally overlooked. Dating was something they did, and they had made it perfectly clear that it didn't involve her, a bookish late bloomer. She would pass them in the hall, the freakishly full grown men in jerseys, holding court by their lockers, surrounded seemingly at all times by a bevy of doting, docile cheerleaders in their white booty shorts, which were so often strangely on display under their schoolgirl skirts, which were, for these ostensible paragons of wholesomeness, perversely short. She remembered one particular time passing by some dusty-haired boy looming over a petite specimen, his forearm propped on the cold metal above her. They seemed so satisfied in the bubble of attention around them. They looked up momentarily as she walked by. They sized her up. Did the corners of their smiles pull smugly back a little as they did?

So when the boy asked her if she wanted to go to a movie, she said yes. She had already won her way into the college of her choice. With the opportunity she had fought for for the past four years already in her grasp, she could allow herself the distraction of a movie or two. He seemed harmless enough.

As he dropped her off at the end of the night, he asked if he could kiss her. It was a quick peck, but her lips returned to his immediately, and there they lingered for an extra second. Their lips both parted, ever so slightly. When he asked her out again, she said yes.

They went out a few times that summer, and each time, the length of time it took for him to drop her off at the end of the night increased as she kissed him a little longer. Eventually, they would find someplace to park his car, and they would couple for what seemed like hours. He would grab her breasts over her shirt, and she would let him. It felt good. That was as far as she would go, though. When his hand would wander down to her legs, she would push it away. Was she tempted? Sorely, but she felt uncomfortable. She would walk away, her panties so wet she practically had to wring them out.

"Oh, that poor boy," Mara chimed.

"How so?"

She gleefully launched into a pseudo-scientific explanation of how, if they made out for hours, there was no way he wasn't hard from the second their tongues slid over one another's, and if he was hard that whole time...

"No!" It had never occurred to Katie to ponder what might be going on inside those jeans. "He was so sweet. I can't imagine him with an..." An erection. She couldn't imagine him with an erection.

"He could be sweet and still want to fuck you. In fact, I'd be offended if he didn't want to. They're kind of programmed to want to. It's unrelenting. If not for that, none of us might be here. It's elemental."

Mara continued, for good measure cupping one of her hands and gripping an invisible cylinder with the other to illustrate his predicament more fully, "...if he was hard the whole time, blood would pool around his testicles and eventually, that would create pressure that would make them incredibly sore, like someone had kicked him."

"Oh no!" Katie felt a genuine wince of sympathetic pain when she pictured how she had unknowingly tormented him.

"Don't feel bad. It's not fatal, no matter what the little deceits might say. Cost of owning the hardware. You're under no obligation, and in fact, had you done it on purpose - stretched things out as long as you possibly could before putting him out of his misery, he would have lost his mind. Fan for life."

Katie simply stared in mute amazement. Mara had, in a few short minutes, given her more to think about on the subject than she had learned in her entire life up to this point. She was like an older sister - an older, wiser, and much, much worldlier sister.

"So why didn't you go all the way with the nice boy then?"

"Afraid I guess."

"Afraid of what?"

Katie ticked off the list. "Afraid to reveal the state I was in. I couldn't have imagined letting anyone see that. Afraid of getting pregnant for another. Afraid of doing something wrong. Afraid it would hurt. My mom told me it hurts a lot the first time."

"Yeah, she was exaggerating. I can't say I blame her. I would, too, if you were my daughter. Keep you out of trouble. Are you still afraid?"