Where it happened: Spring Break
Langauge: English
Sex: Female
Rating: 10
Category: Straight
When I was 10, my 16 y/o stepbrother undid the bathroom lock when I was showering and raped me. I bled for two days and I hurt for a month. Mom said it was my first period and dismissed my notion that brothers could cause periods. I showered at my girlfriend’s until my stepbrother joined the Marines. Until college, I wore two panties. I had to keep a light on, while sleeping, until my senior year in college. I immersed myself into my piano.
In the face of my aversion to boys, my parents had to nag me into my junior prom. My prom date dragged me toward a motel room across a parking lot. My screams got an older couple involved who sheltered me in their room until my stepfather came for me. Though my gown was ripped down to my waist and I went home wearing my stepfather’s shirt, the subject was never brought up at home. That was the way we made things “go away” in my house. Anyway, the subject of dates was dropped. My first date was my last date for three more years.
At the beginning of sophomore year in college, I put in for a math tutor even before the first class meeting of Concepts of Modern Mathematics. As a piano performance major, math was always my bugaboo and I postponed that requirement my first year. My tutor arrived and it was none other than an ex-classmate from high school. Dave had asked me out several times back then and I had turned him down rather rudely. There he was, with his horn-rimmed glasses, pocket protector with at least a dozen pens and pencils, shirt neither in nor out, and a calculator hanging from his belt. Not surprisingly, he was majoring in mechanical engineering.
I was ashamed of myself and invited him into my room to apologize. Dave was completely at ease and dismissed my treatment of him with a shrug of the shoulders, saying we both had a chance to grow up. He saw my name on the list at the math department office and asked to be assigned to me. He candidly stated that math tutoring was a good way to meet girls and he wanted to give me a try. If I could use his help, he would help me. If something developed, that would be great and if it didn’t, it didn’t. If I wanted some other guy to tutor me, that was also OK. He was so easy and comfortable, it was clear he had grown up. It was also clear that I had some growing up still to do.
After flunking my first exam, Dave suggested I drop the course, let him tutor me in algebra, and get a further postponement on the math requirement until the next semester. He took me into his Dean of Engineering and obtained help in getting my Dean of Music to approve the plan.
Thanks to Dave, I understood algebra for the first time in my life. At next semester’s registration, I found to my dismay that the math concepts course was not offered in the Spring but Dave knew that. He pointed out in the college catalog where it said it wasn’t. I felt about two inches tall. I was to enroll in calculus where he assured me I would do just fine. Besides, he felt he didn’t understand the “concepts” course all that well himself. I felt almost optimistic when Dave said he could get me through. Dave was so good a tutor that I signed up for “bunny physics” rather than astronomy at his urging and promising to tutor me in science.
Dave tutored me for two whole semesters and didn’t make one pass on me. I got a B on the calculus and a B+ on the physics which did me an enormous amount of good. I called up Dave to tell him my good news and I asked if there was anything I could do to thank him. Dave said we both had to thank the deans, to dress up as I do for a concert and he would make appointments for the Monday. He said he had put considerable of his personal credit on the line and this was necessary to do.
This sounds like I’m a snob and I suppose I am somewhat, but I keep myself trim, physically fit and I always dress presentably. (My high school music teacher explained it’s part of the concert hall presentation.) On the other hand, Dave is a walking grooming disaster. He is Calvin Klein’s worst nightmare come true. Even in a suit, he has a disheveled look about him. Part of it is he is short and pudgy but that is just the way he is. So we were quite the odd couple as we paid a thank-you visit to his engineering dean and then to my music dean. When we walked out, Dave said, “As long as we are dressed for it, we might just as well stop in at the university president’s reception.” Dave had an invitation for himself and “guest” because he was in the top 25 of 8600 sophomores. Dave has a great personality so people warm up to him instantly and I soon forgot my qualms about being seen with him. As I said, I had a lot of growing up to do.
After the reception, Dave suggested we get a bite to eat. A bite to eat turned out to be at the house he was sharing with two girls. This was the first time I was at his place. The pinup poster that all boys have, was on the ceiling above his bed–a Star Trek Klingon babe in a bikini with three bras on her chest. I had to admit it was a hoot. His room was messy and over-crowded with stereo, computers, and tools everywhere. The empty space on the table, with white linen napkins and cloth, had evidently been obtained by the expenditure of space on his bed, which was piled high with stuff. That was a relief; at least dessert was going to be something other than me.
Also there were programs for the eight recitals and the two concerts I had given so far in college. When I asked, Dave shrugged his shoulders and said he liked music. True, he had my kind of music playing on his stereo but weren’t there recitals by other students? Dave replied that other students weren’t having dinner with him right now. I didn’t know whether he was a smooth operator or was obsessed with me. As I was to learn, he was both.
Dinner was great. The centerpiece was a pale green rice bowl with goldfish and a floating candle. The china was Japanese enamelware. One of his housemates was Japanese and she cooked up a Japanese meal for Dave and me. Fujiko, in her kimono, presented us with hot, moist face clothes followed by several courses. As long as she was coming in and out with her tiny steps, bows and smiles, I felt safe.
He drove me home but before he drove off, he took my hand and asked if he could ask a very personal question–Did my night at the junior prom turn out badly? Is that why I don’t date? I felt very crowded and demanded to know why he had been following my personal affairs so closely. Dave said he was interested in me in high school, other girls had confided they were forcibly assaulted by my prom date so maybe I had been too, for a whole school year of tutoring with him I had been “on guard” and we both knew it wasn’t for anything he did.
Dave said he would ask me for a date the next fall and I had all Summer to think about it while I was at the Salzburg Mozarteum. I got onto him again until he pointed out my Summer plans were in my last concert program and with that he started up his car. I was feeling two inches tall again.
I did want to get married and have children and the way I was going, I was destined to be a dried up, old spinster who would die alone, mourned only by her neurotic cat. I had to let down my defenses someday and while I didn’t see Dave as husband material, I was appreciative and I did owe him. Most of all, he was comfortable and safe. I sent Dave a couple of letters and brought him back a Tyrol hat. We dated that fall.
Right after Thanksgiving I closed my eyes after saying goodnight and let the overdue kiss happen. It was a gentle, lingering kiss that was a prolonged nibble on my upper lip. He didn’t hold me, but just held my hands at the ends of my hanging arms. All I had to do was to step back to break the kiss but I didn’t want to.
On New Year’s Eve, he was cupping my breast in his hand and stroking my nipple with his thumb as he held me in his arms on the sofa. That was so cozy and nice, I fell asleep on him. His odor was agreeable, too.
On Valentine’s, he came to my practice room, handed me three red roses, and held me in his arms as we kissed. Before I knew it, he had his hand under my skirt, giving me long, rhythmic, virtuoso strokes as we leaned against the door. Outrage was in a pitched battle with rapture. When my pleasure approached a crest, I couldn’t surrender and I shivered it off. He matter-of-factly slipped some tissues into my panties, gave me another lingering kiss, and simply held me in his arms. After a few minutes, he released me and asked to remain while I practiced. I tried but my fingers stumbled. I felt so uptight. My major agitation was from being afraid to receive pleasure. Having that fear alarmed me.
I picked a stupid fight over Dave’s love expertise, or rather I tried to. Dave acknowledged he went wild during freshman year after not having any dates at all in high school and he learned some fun lessons and some hard lessons. He assured me that since then, he is a one-girl-at-a-time guy.
If that wasn’t enough, Fujiko came to my place said that she and the other girl in the house were two of Dave’s three lovers and everybody was to blame since everybody behaved stupidly freshman year which ended in a tragedy. Now they are intimate brother-sister house mates and Dave is one of the most trustworthy and decent people she knows.
So I decided to make up with Dave and went to him. He asked me where I thought our relationship was going. I asked him to say what he thought and he thought we were on our way to bed. I sort of knew but it shocked me to have it put into words. Dave also said the way things were going, we would be on our way to bed just to fool around, short of actual intercourse. Perhaps we’ll get married before we went all the way, because he sees trust as being a big issue with me.
Dave’s mention of marriage churned my insides. My thought of having no intention of marrying him was followed immediately with the confession to myself that I had been using him just as surely as do boys who use girls only to dump them. My words blurted out before I could bite them off, words to the effect of marriage?–fat chance. Dave shrugged his shoulders as he does and said, “I think you have been drifting along and allowing things to happen. You need to decide what you want with me.” With that, he sent me home to think about it. Two inches tall, and all that.
If I wanted a relationship, Dave was about as gentle and patient as I was likely to find. He is no hunk but he certainly is a sweetheart. By the time I got home I had come to some conclusions: Having endured two hunks, maybe it was “hunks” I really needed to give up on. To love is to take a chance and to trust. I phoned him to tell him my conclusions. Dave asked, “Reasonable premises. You didn’t say what want from me. To go forward or to back off?” I paused, took a deep breath and said, “Forward, please.”
Two days later, I was in his arms again when he asked me to go away on Spring Break with him. I had a problem that I had to maintain my practicing. “No prob,” he said, “you have a portable keyboard. The question you need to answer is: do you wish to share a bed with me?” All I could do was to nod yes with my face in his chest and plead that he not force things.
He showed me lab reports for himself for negative STD tests and told me he had sex with 5 girls in freshman year and with nobody since. I asked why Fujiko said only three and he told me he didn’t know all of Fujiko’s escapades either, the point was he was exposed to dozens, second-hand and to perhaps hundreds, third-hand and he had given himself earnest scolding. He would bring along condoms and whether we used them were up to me. He asked me to get pills at Student Health, just in case. Intercourse will be one of those “it happens if it happens” things but babies or infections mustn’t “just happen.”
I had no idea of our destination, just that we were tagging along on a field trip for a marine biology class to someplace called Cape May in New Jersey. Our bus arrived in the wee hours of Saturday, at an elegant, but faded, resort hotel that hadn’t opened up for the season but was being used by our group. The furniture in the public rooms was covered with sheets. The elevator, not operational, was a gilded cage affair of the sort I last saw in Paris. We walked up the back stairs because we were wet from bringing in the groceries we had brought with us. It was definitely “camping out,” as we had to be our own maid service, bring our own groceries, fix our own meals in the kitchen, and wash up our mess. It was raining hard and the lights went out so the only thing to do was to go to bed but first we had to make our bed by flashlight. It was looking pretty grim.
The next morning it was still raining hard. The room was cold and damp. I was snuggled up under Dave’s arm. I was grateful for his being warm, soft, and passive. We could see we had a fireplace and love seat in our room. The bed was an antique canopied affair. An expedition to the bath revealed a huge antique tub standing on eagle feet on gold balls. The basin and other porcelain were decorated with blue line, Chinese motif of birds and flowers and marked, “Josiah Spode Ltd., Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, Eng.” Being old, stained, and crazed does not matter with fixtures like these. The place would be pretty ritzy if only there were some staff, staff perhaps bringing me a cup of cocoa with a marshmallow floating in it. We went down the staff stairs to the huge kitchen, to cook ourselves some breakfast. The field trippers had left long ago.
After our breakfast, while I washed up, Dave carried firewood up to our room. I joined him and began to set up my keyboard as he started a fire. The electrical outlets were two-pronged and my keyboard has a three-pronged plug. He suggested we have a look around the hotel and consider our options. (Engineers are great ones for “considering options” when disaster strikes.) While Dave remained his shoulder-shrugging sangfroid self, I was becoming one unhappy camper.
This time we went down the front way, via the wide, white marble staircase with worn, red carpeting. Dave steered me through the lobby, into the lounge and…
……..there it was, a century-old, (serial no. 75,233), Model D. No sheet over it. It was open, even. With a carved Victorian stool upholstered in black brocade. The condition of the lacquer should have been enough to tell. It had been polished correctly all those years. (Every last piano at school is marred with circular polishing.) A few arpeggios and yes, indeed, this was a living instrument. Not only that, but in concert tune, too. (This is why Dave had me bring three recital gowns and one concert gown. I was wondering why I bothered.) Grand pianos just don’t come any grander than this. I just stood there and stared at it. Dave was silently standing in the doorway. Our elderly hostess entered, broke my reverie and observed I had indeed discovered her late husband’s “kept woman.” Mrs. Newkirk somehow knew my name and my exercising her treasured Steinway was a foregone privilege. She agreed to a couple of tables from the dining room being moved, one behind the stool for me, one to the side for Dave for his studying.
The formality of performing exercises in gown, pumps, and pearls was so right. The Model D. The off-white, gilt-trimmed lounge. The gas-fired fireplace. Dave near me, in his personal island of chaos. Mrs. Newkirk near the windows looking at us contentedly rather than at her cross-stitch project in her lap. (She seemed glad to see her Steinway played…Surely she missed her husband…I need to count my own blessings for having Dave.) Things were definitely looking up. The Steinway was just so warm and mellow. It was two days before I realized genuine ivory keys were caressing my fingertips right back. Each evening, I gave a formal concert by candle light to exhausted and morose biologists slumping on sofas and sprawled on the rug. (The rain and chill never let up for them.) This was to be my most productive week ever of my schooling.
The piano technician stopped by the first morning and asked Dave if the Steinway was satisfactory even though I was the one on the stool. The piano didn’t just “happen.” Dave had made a number of phone calls to both Mrs. Newkirk and the technician to make sure the piano truly was distinguished and to make sure it truly was in tune. His giving me this surprise treat, just for me, really helped me with the trust.
It was a fairy tale week. The Steinway meant Dave really, truly cared as if I hadn’t seen that already. We shared a bed. We got naked for the first time on the rug in front of the log fire. We kissed and petted and hugged and caressed and conversed and had a wonderful, snugly time. Dave was perfectly content for the week to be one, long make-out session. My Victoria Secret nighties I got especially for the trip never came out of the drawer. I shielded myself in my flannel pajamas the first night, woke up unmolested in Dave’s arms, discovered he provided me a phenomenal piano, and afterward, I never gave sleepwear a thought.
Toward the end of the week, Dave tried to join me in the shower and I went psychotic. It wasn’t his fault and I had to tell him, polluted and abased as I was, humiliated and vulnerable as I was, I just had to tell him, as difficult as it was, about my rape at age ten and my almost-rape at sixteen. Dave tenderly finished drying me off, just held me close, had me relive still again every detail of my terror, held me some more and kissed me to sleep. The next morning, I felt so sheltered and secure when I woke, that I took wanton initiative for my first time and put his hand between my legs.
I wasn’t quite sure I had orgasms before. They were pleasant and nice enough: A nice crescendo followed by a nice diminuendo. The morning following our version of the “Psycho” bathtub scene, Dave gave me a nice crescendo culminating in a tsunami. If a woman is not quite sure, she simply has never experienced one. It wasn’t intercourse but it was the “first time” forever forged in my soul.
My woman’s body functioned! I had to make sure it was still working before lunch so we knocked off work early. It worked after lunch, as well. It even worked after supper, causing the evening concert to start ten minutes late. And again after the concert. I was ecstatic. If the others might have been speculating, I was beyond caring. I wasn’t about to make an announcement but I now look kindly on women who did broadcast their news. Dave found immense amusement at my exhilaration and good-naturedly demanded absolution for his own freshman-year excesses.
The morning we left, I got on top of Dave but I spasmed up and couldn’t let him in, try as I could. Dave was nonchalant about it. He had the attitude it was only a matter of time. We had a nice pet, put the quilted cover on the “kept woman” after playing her a farewell etude, and snuggled up on the bus.
My prof innocently commented on my much improved expression, that I must have had a good trip. I wished I had a snappy comeback but I didn’t. My face burned and my fingers stumbled until he dismissed me early. I owed him an explanation: I had six hours of productive practice every day, an hour concert every evening, seven hours a day for eight days on a Steinway Model D in concert condition–my version of Ft. Lauderdale debauchery.
At the end of my next lesson, I was able to give him the genuine explanation: My psyche is mending. Telling him, after Dave and then the therapist, about my violations was easier, and yes, I had begun proper therapy two days after returning to campus. Easier still, telling about my first male friend and lover, the lover who arranged for that Model D. My music moved off its plateau and began to soar.
The rest of the semester, the pets were just divine but Dave held off intercourse. The way he articulated it was: I learned sexual algebra last fall, doing just fine with the sexual calculus now, and there’s plenty of time to do sexual differential equations next fall. The snail’s pace I requested previously, the snail’s pace I still needed, I was still receiving, in spite of my new-found impatience. I settled for an agreement to share my apartment with him, come the end of Summer. I was proud and honored to be Dave’s escort at the President’s reception. Such a difference a year makes!
As I was leaving for a summer at Konigsberg, Dave presented me with a present— a silicone rubber cast of a portion of himself and a tube of Astrolube. Dave, my tutor, had given me homework. I attended to my homework faithfully.
Less than a month after his moving in with me, on our first try, Dave and I scored. It was a rather crummy coupling but we accomplished it. Dave proposed marriage to me right after. I declined because I didn’t think I deserved it. Dave was so sweet when he told me we both had come a long way and we both deserved it. I can’t say when we actually had our first good lay because the improvement was gradual and inconsistent.
After Christmas Break, we realized we were consistently having great lays. Now, I felt getting married would be fair to Dave. We got married at school at the start of Spring Break so we could honeymoon at Cape May. It is said you should never try to duplicate a quintessential vacation but we surpassed it. It was bittersweet, the previous year, that we had to adjourn just when it was becoming scrumptious. Our honeymoon started where that visit left off.
Because my music is doing so well, we both wanted me to obtain my MFA. Dave acquiesced to going for his master’s in spite of being tired of school. Several times, in nearly 22 months of marriage, after thinking it was as beautiful as it could possibly be, we noticed it became even better.
I am the luckiest woman in the world. I am the girl Dave coveted since ninth grade. I have the most benevolent koala bear for a protector, coach, lover and friend.
Our only worry is whether we get jobs next June.
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