5 comments/ 36261 views/ 1 favorites Finding Erin By: Nellskitchen Part: The First We met at one of her customary haunts, a busy little Brazilian place called Bossa Nova. From our table, conveniently located near the front entrance, the crowded market was in full view. Its customers busily scurried about in what seemed an existence parallel to, but absent chance of intersection with, our nearly motionless selves. Upon arriving, I had thought that the clamor from the street which spilled into the restaurant each time the door swung open might prove too much of a distraction. But after a moment's time, it all seemed to fade as my scrutiny of her striking appearance became a preoccupation and her soft but confident voice lured my attention away from the diversions of a world passing by. Not surprisingly, she had almost instantly become anxious with the process and her delicate features were powerless to hide it. Having only formally met her moments before, I had already detected her tendency to fidget slightly when pressured. It stood to reason. Relating the intimate details of her first sexual experience to a virtual unknown made her uneasy. It showed as the laser focus of her eyes wandered away from me, seeking solace elsewhere amidst the comfort of the strangers sitting all about. Grasping her disquiet, I flipped back through several pages of illegible handwriting, pretending to be searching for some overlooked bit of scrawl. She waited uncomplainingly opposite me, displaying the courtesy I had come to admire about her; a civility which she had demonstrated during weeks of online interrogation about her sex life, driven by the Frankenstein monster which emerged every time my brain switched into writing mode. The whole thing was embarrassing to her, which I understood. I wasn't even sure exactly why she had allowed me to come to London to do the interview; why she had even shown up today and why she put up with my intrusiveness. But she had her reasons and I approached the venture based on a solitary notion; that she, like so many women was a penetration junkie, lured by the search but fearful of discovery. She had considerable powers and used my eyes as a transom through which she probed my brain's database for hidden clues as to my motive. She had to know if I was for real and used that incisive gaze as one might wield a saber against an intruder who ventured too closely to her secrets. She was a perfect prospect really, a delicate combination of feminine intuition and physical beauty so uniquely Irish. With a retiring temperament and a virginal yet sizzling sexual bearing, she had limited experience in bed and with one foot still planted on the Emerald Isle, she seemed oddly out of place in the bustle of twenty-first century London. It was something I wondered about and guessed she'd likely be more comfortable residing between the lines of a Jane Austen novel, where her dignity and grace might be better appreciated. Instead, her qualities stood in contrast with a modern city environment where, in the midst of millions, she searched for stability while simultaneously daring herself to break free from the very boundaries within which she had been raised. Initially she had seemed more relaxed than I had expected, but I could tell the constraints of time and the burrowing nature of my questioning were beginning to overwhelm her otherwise composed stateliness. With my questions coming in motorized succession, almost too late I sensed she was about to call a halt by simply departing. At last admitting to my own overly aggressive clumsiness, I paused as if to review my notes. It was a hoax of course, one I had learned from an old friend in New York when I first started writing. "Give your subject some breathing room, Heather," Peter had advised. "Don't be your usual all-consuming self with other women and you may just convince a hesitant prospect to tell you her story." Older and obviously wiser than I, my patient lover somehow knew such things. He was so smart... It was good advice, of course, but the vitality which characterized my analytical skills forced me to relearn it the hard way from time to time and in this instance, I couldn't afford to let her slip through my fingers. She had a friendly face and I liked her. Having accepted that mystifying smile as a positive sign, I tried my best to remember that my friend Laya had made a good point; that New Yorkers could be snippy and overbearing, which begged the question: would Erin eventually grow to tolerate such encroachment? Success would ultimately rest on that question. The scholarly woman's significance as a subject would have been apparent to even the most inexpert writer. She personified an erotic story whose diamond lay hidden in the rough of a mind which for three years had attempted to blot out her experience with the Peruvian. Without entirely realizing it, Erin Rankin oozed sexuality and possessed a coveted attribute I sought in my research on feminine intimacy; an unpretentious nature which implied vulnerability...a true indication of sensuality. But she was also a challenge, since characters with her persona almost by definition were difficult to build stories around. Tending to obsessive privacy, they harbored multiple intelligences which stood sentinel between researcher and subject like Gibraltar guarding the straits, in so doing preserving their secrets out of the reach of my prying mind's eye. I reasoned that only the most expertly delivered approach might succeed in bringing her story to light. It all stood to reason, of course, because I was hunting the very sexuality she had practiced a lifetime concealing and I was certain she was withholding erotic secrets whose entirety she denied the existence of, even to herself. "I've never revealed this to anyone," she admitted to me in a note one day. From that moment, in bits and pieces it trickled out but I knew the details from so disciplined a mind would be thorny, and displaying them in print to an intimidating world would expose her to dangers from which less discerning women had recoiled, thereby stalling my investigation. Those who granted themselves permission to navigate the sensitive process were agreeing to be outed as sexual beings; fallen women who had given themselves away, something a part of them regretted in perpetuity. Another part was glad, of course, and in Erin's case emotions warred with themselves deep in a mind surrounded by defensive shields of her own creation, shields that included an obsession with books, scholarship and a flight from all things male. And just to add to my complications, she was Irish and in Ireland the progress of female sexuality crawled forward at a pace frustratingly slow to an American used to assuming the world looked at things the way she did. In a peculiar twist, Erin maintained a duality; an urge to experience risk - if only sparingly - which acted in opposition to a traditional upbringing that had instilled in her the virtues of a firm moral grounding. One could easily fall in love with her physical appeal alone. She was perfectly beautiful, with porcelain skin and auburn hair which fell loosely about narrow shoulders. She was slender, carrying not an ounce of extra weight, at least not that I could see. Her eyes were green and their obvious aptitude for fathoming others seemed at cross purposes with the mildness of her physical presentation. A study in contrasts, I thought, as I methodically reconnoitered what I hoped were faltering defenses. Contrasts were challenging and I had sensed from the beginning that Erin's disparities might prove fertile ground for literary cultivation. Allowing my own eyes to wander back and forth between notepad and subject, I continued my perusal of her body, observing breasts which due to the slimness of her upper torso made them appear heavy. With a tendency to allow her shoulders to lean slightly inwards in what I determined to be a futile attempt to deemphasize a well-endowed form, one might easily misperceive their actual size. "She doesn't like them," I thought, glimpsing their fullness as she shifted in her chair. "This girl is hiding, which means she has something to hide, which means she has something worth finding." My determination bolstered, I cautiously moved forward. True to form, she spoke softly, when she did speak, as if to diminish what I already knew to be a natural resolve. There was an inner strength about her, which by itself might have been confusing, had she not previously tutored me regarding the question of Gaelic women; women taught from childhood to suppress manifestations of their capabilities in the presence of others. And she was smart. I had felt her authority from the moment we began our correspondence and today's face to face hadn't altered that first impression. Not wanting to risk scaring her back into the shadows from which she was now, at age twenty-three, just emerging, I had to be careful. Working in my favor were two things; she was curious about me, wanting to know why I was interested in her sexual saga, but more importantly she recognized that by allowing herself to be probed, she might just unearth her own willfully hidden identity. Interestingly, she had grown up Catholic, a faith now overtly rejected, yet I detected a need in her to confess something. But she had rules and her confessor had to be to a virtual stranger -- the modern woman's reasonable facsimile of the priest of her early years, hidden at the back of a computer screen and to whom she could safely unburden herself. To that end I understood she had invented me, indeed had almost willed my existence in order to have someone to whom her secrets might be revealed, just as two years earlier she had invented the Peruvian for him to take by storm the gift she could offer only once; her virginity. It was November and we had met online two months earlier during my wearisome pursuit of an editor versed in languages. A chance thing, I had spied her mildly daunting web page in the editor's section, something that strangely drew me. Like many writers, I needed someone smart looking over my shoulder as I sported a tendency to stumble over my own verbiage, leaving glaring errors in my wake as keyboard-driven fingers outran disordered thoughts. I needed an overseer holding a bridle and wielding a riding crop in the form of an intimidating red pen. Erin was each of these things and more and had agreed to review my work. One day it just happened. Our intimate thoughts began seeping through during a routine document exchange. I can't remember who initiated it, but within the short distance of a few emails we tumbled together and though virtual strangers, opened ourselves in so naively feminine fashion. The comfort which came with living on opposite sides of a vast ocean meant we could let slip unthinkable things, sexual things, without fear of being judged. The effect was as liberating as it was erotic. I was sure neither of us had ever before put her darkest secrets on display for another person. Maturity simply has a way of imposing its own fear of emotional exposure. But the willingness with which each of us opened herself to things furtive, long locked away in the recesses of her soul, was startling. I prayed and she hoped we weren't unleashing the Furies. "I still can't believe I'm telling you these things," she offered one day. Of course I felt exactly the same. We eventually admitted to the sense of stimulation we each experienced in the other's delicate hands as doors long kept bolted shut swing open, causing an unexpected chain reaction. Releasing what lay behind was only the start, of course, and as each secret surfaced, the next proved all the easier, as did the next and the next. With talk of bringing a man to ejaculation through fellatio and whether size really mattered in her determined goal of experiencing anal sex, all released amidst a myriad of cultural variation between how Irish and American women viewed physical release, we recklessly laid bare our intimate selves for examination and commentary by the other. That was months ago and now at long last I was sitting with her and felt, just as Erin did, that our unexpected comfort bathed us like the morning sun streaming in through a window, not only warming our acquaintance but deepening it frighteningly by virtue of the emotional dependency it generated; a dependency based on what each knew of the darkest thoughts and longings of the other. Solitary women by both temperament and design, we both hungered after and feared the very bond now overtaking us. With the impulsiveness of adolescents and an idealistically hazarded trust too common among females, we disregarded dangers and each freely admitted to past injuries sustained from a woman's natural compulsion to open herself to others. I recognized it was more perilous for Erin because as a writer, my mind's inner workings were already exposed to a readership while she, like so many girls, remained confined behind the sanctuary of a disciplined intellect. It had all started one day with the simultaneous detection of a natural chemistry between us. Throwing caution to the wind, I put a question to her to which I half expected never to receive a response. "Erin," I asked, "have you had sex with a man?" Underlying it all was something which gnawed at me due to its duplicity and involved my latest project; research into a lightly studied region too often sidestepped by feminists; the loss of virtue and how each woman perceived it. That professional motivation leaned heavily against a thrilling friendship whose integrity I wished to protect and I knew treading carefully was central. But she did write back and shocked me by the frankness of her response. It was as if she had been waiting for this exact opportunity so she could slip back to a place where it had all happened, to share it with someone who understood; to re-examine the unsatisfying events of three years earlier without fear I would snitch to her parents. The opportunity worked for both of us and frankly I was already addicted to reading her musings, eagerly awaiting the appearance of her name in my inbox each day. A heady "girl thing" from the start, neither of us could have imagined that our often blatantly sexual correspondence would burst into a torrent of exchanges as each undressed herself, opening her secret yearnings to scrutiny by the other. "I'll send you a fantasy of mine if you'll do the same," I offered one day. Hovering momentarily in cyberspace, she nearly faltered. "I don't think I can...well, all right, yes; I'll do it - for you. Do you promise to send me one of yours?" "Yes, of course," I wrote back. "I'll send mine first if you like, but you mustn't open the attachment until you click "send," affording me fondling rights in New York as you dissect mine in London." The ice had been broken and she came to the surface like a resplendent mermaid from an intimate abyss, drenched in what happened to her, dripping wet with erotic wonderings and a desire to compare girl notes to see whether what had occurred in Peru with Hernan Ugarte was in some way a distortion or just an ordinary matter of first intercourse turned disappointing. In the process, we shared recollections of intimacies that men would never dream of revealing to other men. All business is what men are, at least by comparison; most often burying their secrets deeply outside the demarcations of superficial friendships, perhaps on the odd occasion moving past the apparent, but nothing like this. In a most exciting turn, with each email one of us would subtly up the stakes, dropping a fact here and there which lurked in the shadows of our minds, sometimes resulting in complex responses from the other woman, sent asking ever more provocative questions which only generated another round of e-mails. Time seemed to speed up as responses which at the start might have taken a week to spawn were returned complete in a matter of hours. Finally, by mid-October, we had indeed exchanged lurid sexual fantasies and were guardedly mapping out far-reaching editorial comments on one another's prurience. Mine had involved a pair of guys, bisexuals interested in a threesome where I made the rules and called on the boys to fuck each other in my presence before being allowed to touch me. Erin countered with her own startling revelation which saw her, at least partially against her will, admitted to a clinic for women who couldn't orgasm and where her "treatment" involved being tied up and coerced into sex with resident therapists. I think each shocked the other, at least a little. Like school girls hotly exchanging X-rated dreams, she took me ever deeper into her private visions, finally coming to rest one day a week ago when she offhandedly admitted her fascination with double penetration and bondage. Had I not sensed something significant was afoot beforehand, I might have been shaken out of my wits. But by then, I knew she wanted to tell me something noteworthy and it wasn't going to involve your run of the mill career woman screwing her boss on lunch hour. I heard it said once that without language there could be no thought, and internet relationships tend to peculiarity because two people develop visuals based on words, first pictured in the mind of their writer, transformed into language, sent to another, read and finally transformed yet again back into pictures in the mind of the receiver. Funnily, the process is highly prone to error. The person one eventually meets is rarely what she looks like in the mind of the beholder. Given the absurdity of wondering how a person appears with only her written words at one's disposal had left me envisioning a simple country girl about whom my mind worked overtime in a laughable attempt to conjure an image that I could picture when addressing her during imagined conversation. One had to have some sort of likeness, right? The disorienting phenomenon wasn't new to me as it had happened once before during my search for the mysterious subject of my last book. In the end I had traveled to Seattle to entice a prostitute into playing on the grand stage of that literary foray, a book which now took me to London, ostensibly for the purpose of its promotion. Spending hours signing dust covers in stuffy bookstores, all I really thought about was meeting Erin. A woman's curiosity had seized control of me and with every female I passed on the sidewalk, thoughts that it might be her swept through my mind. "I want to write you, Erin," I bluntly stated during one of our various exchanges. "You -- want to write to me? You are writing to me, Heather," she responded, slightly puzzled by the seeming non-sequitur, which wasn't the case at all since I had been mulling over the thought of folding a story around her character for weeks, but had stumbled out of nervousness in the presentation. "No Erin, I mean I want to write a story about you," I said, clarifying the point. Her alluring innocence shone in the simplicity of her response: "Why would anyone be interested in me?" She was genuinely perplexed at the suggestion she might be remarkable. But she was, and the very innocence which provoked her question was the most telling point of her appeal. Replying to her moments later, I framed my argument. "Erin, maybe I'm only seeing my reflection in a corner of the great literary mirror," I rejoined, "but if you interest me to the point of fascination, then others will want to know about you as well. I'll have to meet you for a series of interviews and I've learned you're the world's most obsessively private woman. Can you set that aside for a time? What do you say?" "An interview? What would you want to talk about?" she inquired, hedging a bit more now. Finding Erin "I can't just know you through email, Erin - not if I'm going to make you the subject of a story. I must get a better feel for who you are and want to listen to that chronicle of your emergent sexuality in Peru." "Peru? I don't think 'emergent' is an accurate description, Heather. It's just something I want to put behind me." Peru. What had happened to her there? She had had lost her virginity in a sizzling affair lasting all of two weekends. Prompted by my entirely improper question about her initiation into the world of sexual intercourse, she nonchalantly wrote that after finishing her university studies she took a job teaching there, where she had allowed herself to be taken by a South American. Instant messaging her one day I wrote, "That's what I want to know about. I want to write a story about that exotic place and about the man whom you allowed into your body not only once, but repeatedly thereafter - a "loss of virginity" story which simultaneously haunts and captivates every girl but which not everyone can reflect on the way you might." She abruptly terminated the instant message, prompting the start of a week of roaring silence before I heard from her again. When her name finally reappeared on my message list I took a deep breath and wondered whether she'd go for it, or was this simply goodbye? As usual, she surprised me. "I'll do it," she wrote. "It seems mad, but I'll meet with you if you come to London and...I'll tell you everything." I was right. She did want to confess and fortunately had made the decision to do so in my confessional. Part: The Second It wasn't really lunch. Women "do lunch" to talk, and eating acts as a catalyst to facilitate that end. In my experience food provides the superlative medium for the disclosure of secrets. It took us only minutes to get past the niceties before I pulled out my notepad, but the abruptness of the move caused her to stir. Ironically, her discomfort meant she'd likely be a perfect addition to the mosaic I was constructing; a patchwork of women's stories about how suddenly and with a single thrust we transition from virginity to womanhood. Moving directly into research mode, I opened my laptop to browse a list of questions, compiled over the course of the past few months. "So talk to me Erin, tell me about Peru." Her powers of perception were quick to engage. "This isn't just about me, is it, Heather? You've got questions on that screen, don't you? Some of them must be stock items that you ask every girl you interview." "Yes Erin, I thought you understood that. I'm writing a book, actually a compilation of various stories about..." "About how we get fucked?" she snapped mockingly. "I don't know about this, Heather. It's a bit humiliating to be lumped together with a bunch of other unfortunates." She was right and my mind raced up and down my list of email folders which contained multiple correspondences, of which Erin's was only a part. Perhaps, I thought, I had explained all of this to another of the girls, maybe the ill-fated secretary out west who had attended the frat party and allowed herself to be filmed. I couldn't be sure but had somehow neglected this alluring girl. Shit, I knew I had to do something. I was swift to explain. "But I do, Erin; I do want to write just about you. In other words, each of the girls involved in this project will have her own individual chapter. She won't be contrasted on some bar graph against the experiences of the others. Part of the rationale for putting it together is to explain how singular our stories really are. My own saga will be included, by the way." Upon hearing that final statement, her body language relaxed. "So please," I continued nervously, "let's just see where it goes. Please? I'm sorry about the mix-up; I thought I had made everything clear to you. My mistake, I apologize." I hadn't done my homework fully and felt like an idiot. Remembering how I had almost lost Laya in similar fashion I decided not to pose my inane questions after all, but rather to simply let the dialogue flow naturally. Pausing a moment, the pretty woman nodded. "I'll still do it...but I've got to say, the whole thing makes me uncomfortable and I've had dreams about Hernan during the past few weeks. It bothers me, Heather, and I know it's because we've been talking about Peru and what I allowed to happen there." A moment's silence followed. It would be the last for a while. Part: The Third "There was something going on in my mind, Heather, long before I left for South America; Ireland, my parents, the fact that I'm the eldest of four girls. All of these...constraints, and even my college experience had fairly rigid boundaries, at least compared to what I think American girls are used to. It's just a cultural thing, but it's important and I want you to be aware of it." "I understand," I said, nodding. "Anyway, at home I was surrounded by safety nets that I didn't challenge, and my decision to leave Ireland; to leave my comfort zone and travel to South America had everything to do with escaping those safety nets. I didn't admit it to myself at the time, but I wanted excitement...and danger. Pausing, she added, "I hope that makes some sense to you." "Of course it does, Erin," I offered, encouraging her to go on. "Hernan was already teaching at the school when I arrived, and I could see that practically every girl on staff liked him. He was...easy on the eyes if you know what I mean, and he knew it. He was tall -- I like tall men and he stood almost six feet. He had black hair, dark skin and a muscular build that wasn't hidden by the t-shirts and jeans that he wore. I won't say his good looks didn't affect me; they did, but not as much as his personality. He was...mysterious. Whenever he spoke, I always felt that he left much more unsaid. I would leave subtle openings for him to probe me...which he did, sometimes, but I never really knew if he was interested in me or not." Erin hesitated briefly and I detected she had recoiled from something important. Then, looking straight at me, she continued, "And something about him was a little frightening." "Explain," I queried, "how so?" "That's just it, Heather. I can't really explain it, even now. It wasn't that I was afraid of him, although he didn't always treat people nicely - women in particular, and it's something that would instantly have turned me off with an Irishman. But with him...it gave me a tingle." "Beyond him, I was afraid of myself, because after all I had set this whole thing in motion, and I still don't know if I've ever been completely honest with myself in relation to Hernan. Think about it; I did it in a place practically on the other side of the world, with someone I would ultimately leave behind. Naïve as hell is what I was; I completely overlooked the kind of power first-time sex can have over a woman. I can see it looking back, but I understood nothing then." "Anyway," she continued, "finding someone I was attracted to helped to set aside a lot of my cultural gleanings about men and sex. I let myself be open; defenseless really, and it felt...liberating. And scary. But scary in a good way, you know? At the same time, I'd seen what Hernan was like with other women and had heard the rumors so I can't say I was completely certain, about any of it -- but then, there was always uncertainty with him." "We all knew he was sleeping with any number of girls, something I chose to ignore. I told myself it was exciting; that accepting the dangers of being with this man was just one more way of breaking through those safety nets I so wanted to escape. Does that make sense to you?" With a delicate nod I acknowledged her thought. "No one back home would ever know if I did have a relationship with him, unless I chose to tell my family about it once I returned. I'll admit it, the thought of having sex with him crossed my mind any number of times and all I had to do was get him to do it, which even I knew wouldn't be especially difficult. He was a man, wasn't he? But like most girls, deep down I wanted a relationship too and was willing to give up my virginity to try to obtain it. It was that simple, Heather." Erin's hesitant matter-of-factness was gripping. "How did you view your own virginity up to the time you left Ireland?" Mulling over the question for a moment, she smiled that attractive half-smile of hers and continued. "Ultimately as a gift, I suppose, for my husband. At least, that's how I was raised to view it. I don't know...I went back and forth between seeing it like that, and seeing it as something to get out of the way; a step forward in the process of growing into womanhood. I know I'm all over the place with this, Heather, but I suppose you could say all of the above." Having previously taken several women through this same examination process, I was already aware that Erin's perceptions showed similarities with various others -- gift, stigma, rite of passage, impediment to one's development as an adult - each had surfaced before but American women, more often than not, tended to view their hymens as hindrances and not only to first intercourse. Erin's frankness was leading me to believe there might be more continuity with girls in the U.S. than I had expected to find an ocean away and the sex act's frightening attraction seemed to be at the issue's core. "Nevertheless," she continued, "like I said, we all wanted him. Everyone knew his reputation and it seemed that the more shocking the stories, the more girls were drawn to him. He knew it too; how could he not? Women practically swooned over him, and you had to be blind not to notice feminine eyes following his every move." "And you were a swooner?" Laughing mildly she mused, "From the start. Just not publicly. I had too much pride to just throw myself at him for everyone to see, as some of the other girls did. Christ, it wasn't uncommon for him to be seen with two or even three different women in a single evening. My first warning should have been that on the same night he kissed me for the first time, Andrea Pendleton gave him a blowjob in his car. Right in the main plaza, just outside a café. People everywhere. After she'd finished him, they just went inside for a snack. Well...another snack." "How did you find out about the incident with Andrea?" "She told me the next day. I found it odd that it didn't even seem like that big a deal to her...but I figured she was American and maybe that was how American girls saw it. It was the first time I realized that to a girl from the States, a blowjob wasn't sex. She's the one who told me the story of that girl Monica Lewinski and her blue dress." "You had never heard that one?" "Never. I was quite young at the time. It's unbelievable. Some intern gives head to the President of the United States in the White House. No wonder they don't consider fellatio to be sex!" The lurid image of the unfortunate intern on her knees in the Oval Office struck us simultaneously, prompting a moment of shy laughter. Part: The Fourth It hurt more and at the same time, it felt better than I thought it would. Most men don't understand what it means to allow another into your body, to experience physical intimacy so completely. How could they? My mind raced as his hands wandered my breasts. Stop! No, don't stop! He reached down; firmly grasping my ankle, then ran his fingers up my leg, finally coming to rest on one knee which I was using to cling to his hips as he rode me. Wider, I thought - he wants me more open. Half against its will, that knee, already weakened as it received mixed signals from a mind in confusion fell to one side, leaving me pointlessly clutching him with the other. He reached down and grabbed it, firmly pushing it aside, leaving me splayed. I had never felt so vulnerable and envisioned myself bleeding profusely from the initial violence of the act during which I had felt and even heard myself break open. He had simply positioned himself as if a pilot fitting a fighter plane and plunged into me in a rush of raw energy. I became a third party to what followed and found myself looking down at the bed, at Hernan's firm ass, positioned as he was between some other girl's legs, watching her as she struggled against herself in the darkened hotel room; as though it weren't me, but rather some stranger being fucked below. I had never looked at her quite so intently before and her beauty surprised me. How often she had stared back at me in the mirror, yet at this moment it felt like I was seeing her for the first time. I was, in a way, because the girl who had always returned my gaze was gone now, having in a moment vanished into the ether of sex. She waited for the pain to subside, and some of it did, but much more slowly than she hoped and her soreness left her wanting him to stop; not to pull out, but to stop for a few minutes when he might kiss her deeply again, sending the signal, if only a ruse, that he cared about any of this, that she was different from the others, that she had done something special for him; that he might recall having said he loved her only hours before. From where I stood, I could clearly see where their bodies joined, but fortunately she couldn't as the blood would likely have caused panic and she might have pushed him away, rendering all for naught as she would exit not knowing how sexual intimacy even felt. And I understood what she was thinking; that this was supposed to feel good but it didn't, and for the first time she wasn't sure whether she should have allowed it to go this far. But he had said those commanding words, hadn't he? He had uttered them so intently into her ear, the words that a girl will do almost anything after hearing. "Te quiero con todo mi corazón," he had whispered. From that moment, she had directed all; had wanted sex and had even manipulated him into it, knowing full well he was probably lying. "¡Te adoro!" The words struck her as if he were contemplating a pool of still water whose temperature he couldn't be certain of, yet having slipped his naked toe into the warmth of her receptiveness, had, to his delight, found it as inviting as Andrea Pendleton's; as all the others. She searched the blackness of his impenetrable eyes in an attempt to discover some token of truthfulness; a sign that she would be cherished for opening her legs to his whims...but found nothing. He was deep in her now. It had all happened so fast. What did his penis even look like, she wondered? Oh, it hurt and she turned the delicate skin of her face away from him, as her cheeks had become raw from the razor-sharpness of his stubble. Hiding in the hair of his chest she contemplated the hem of her skirt which now lay just beneath her heaving breasts -- breasts left fully exposed in the crush of it all, in the few minutes it had taken him to pull her bra from the delicate objects it was supposed to protect; her armor as it were, the thin white fabric which she had worn specially to have ripped away in the dilemma of not wanting what she wanted so badly. She could feel his hot breath pounding in her ear and whimpered in return. With each pathetic sound he drove deeper into her, into that previously secret opening, into the virginal belly that pointed to a heart broken from the start, a heart that knew none of this was authentic, that soon she'd be gone, leaving him in Peru to do what men do after such things come to an end. The sounds of her whimpers were vividly distinguishable between his rapid thrusts. He didn't lift his head, but continued groaning as his pace quickened. Paying no attention to her fears and her timid pleadings for tenderness, he continued on until after just a few brief minutes, she dutifully wrapped her arms around his neck in supplication. There she left them, not knowing what else to do. Suddenly, she reached for his ears and grasping them, pushed his head back. A look of surprise crossed his face as her eyes seized his, knowing she might only have a moment, a moment filled with the heat and sweat of two bodies which had become mixed and blended in a profane way, never truly having became one. It was, she thought, a last chance to see in. Seizing the moment, her eyes vainly searched him as he pulled at her auburn hair with both hands in an attempt to deflect her scrutiny, to unlock her sudden hold over him but to no avail - it was already too late. She had seen and in an instant recognized there was little more than the emptiness of fixation, a mania of conquest for its own sake, devoid of even the hint of love she had so hoped might really be there. Seeing only that void, she turned away from the blackness of those eyes, from the mask Latin men so often wear in the company of women; a mask excluding her from knowing who he was or whether there was a token of caring to be had beyond the few drops of semen he was about to relinquish to her. Moments after, Hernan lifted himself away from her sore breasts which he had crushed so thoughtlessly only moments earlier and with eyes shut tightly, he released from deep within himself a measured roar as he flooded her soreness with the heat of his sperm. Though thrusting more deeply, again and again, with each passing labor he grew farther away, an inch, a foot, a mile, until he collapsed onto her with his full weight, one final time. Calm followed. Burying his face in the pillow allowed him to reset his intellectual clock after Mr. Hyde's illusive appearance, to catch the breath depleted in seduction. It was over and all grew quiet except for their breathing which seemed to alternate; first his then hers, each breath waning slightly in intensity as she counted silently until full moments passed between them, resulting in a chilling silence which rapidly replaced the clash of bodies that had been. Part: The Fifth "It was my doing, Heather, and in the end I was left with emptiness. All my finely honed skills of reading other people, such as they were, had stood for nothing. I was little more than vulnerability in the form of a woman. But I had done it to myself. I chose Hernan to take me, to take something from me which could never be returned. And in the end...he only did my bidding." "I experienced the full emptiness that I now know sex is in the absence of true affection, Heather. Like most girls, I had read women's accounts of their deflowering since childhood, when I would sneak into the adult section of the library back in Ballintra looking for novels written by women whose memories of their own fateful day eventually found their way into print; books filled with warnings, delight, admonishments and yes, even the fears of all that could ensue. But it turns out those books had taught me nothing." "And afterward?" I asked. "Afterward, good God, Heather - afterward. What had I done? I remember lying awake after Hernan had drifted off to sleep, leaving me staring over his shoulder into an empty room which I, like a child, had hoped would brim over with something, with passion and love and...I don't know. Despite the man lying on top of me, I felt a stinging isolation and the sudden awareness that all of this would be followed by simple fear." "I felt wet and sticky, and he fell asleep while still buried inside my tired body. It was then that I looked for the first time at the other face of this complex yet simple human passage, and the questions started coming, one after the other. What did the other side of sex look like? What would it feel like when he withdrew? Was the wetness streaming down to my stinging bottom a bad sign? Was it his sperm or my own blood?" "Did he not use a condom and not tell me? Should I have seen to it? How would he have gotten it on without my knowing? I was distracted at the start, I know I was. I suddenly wondered - if he had used one at all -- whether it might have broken. Cassie told me that her boyfriend's condom had broken once and she found semen running down her legs when she got up. She told me they leaked sometimes and what if this was one of those times? Maybe the condoms here aren't made very well. Maybe...oh, there were hundreds of maybes." Finding Erin "I could feel myself loosen as what had seemed the enormity of his erection receded from my bruised cervix. I could smell his smell now as his body began its brief journey back to the individual self it had never really abandoned. We were parting and he was sleeping, his breathing slow and labored." "I didn't dare move for fear of waking him." "Why fear?" I asked myself. "Fear of what?" "Before we had sex, I didn't fear him at all, but now concern crept onto my mind's tiny stage: What if I got pregnant by this man I didn't know, whose life played out on a continent a world away from the security of home, the little farm where I had grown up, where as a young girl I had nursed my mum through illness, where my sisters lived; younger girls who had confidence in me. Would they be able to see it all? Would I look different to them? Would they sense sex? How might my actions affect them?" "No, Heather, the other side of virginity didn't appear as I thought it would. I was left anxious, something that lingered for endless weeks after I had flown back beyond the Andes, back to Ireland where I would await the period I had complained of so often in the past, a period I would pray for and eventually welcome like the sunrise." Part: The Last Almost unnoticed, the swirling clamor which early on had presented such distraction in the busy café had faded away as shoppers melted back into the marketplace. Lost in mutual thought for what seemed hours, we were gently awakened from Erin's personal journey by the clinking of dishes and silverware as the waitress mechanically tidied tables in anticipation of the approaching dinner hour, all of which somehow ended the self-imposed, forbidding isolation of the past and returned us to the relative shelter of the present. In contrast to the hum of activity prevalent at the start of the perilous interview, all now seemed tranquil as the time drew near to conclude an experience that going in I knew would be engaging, but which had since become an object of sheer fascination for me. Somehow through it all, both writer and subject had managed to intermingle their powers of concentration to the exclusion of all that had been, and we each were left in wonder at the change now apparent all around as calm replaced clatter and friendship substituted itself for past trepidation. With eyes still focused on the lingering fragments of my notes, my intellect's peripheral vision transcended imperfect senses to detect an assured serenity which had seamlessly overridden Erin's initial unease. Through the telling, she had in some way regained the charm and beauty whose hiding she had so thoroughly mastered, leaving the young woman's loving spirit fully radiant, brightening our surroundings despite the waning rays of the mid-afternoon sun. Her look surprised me a little, given the bruising she must have endured these past hours but all that remained was the gentle beauty of her entrancing eyes; eyes in which now lay an unexpected but welcome contentment. Gracefully folding her hands on the table in front of her, she looked up and I could feel the subtle weight of her patient gaze settling on me as I concluded my work. "I wish I had a happier tale to tell you, Heather," she reflected, a touch of guarded affection in her voice. "Erin," I said, looking directly at her now. "I too wish that Peru had been a better time for you, but you've related what happened with courageous sincerity. Your experience reflects the circumstances of so many women and may even help a few as they risk venturing into the perils of their own sexuality. I am grateful for that and have almost all that I need now to write your narrative." "Almost all?" she asked inquiringly. "Yes, almost...as it is still a story that lacks an ending." A suggestion of mild amusement crossed her face as she whispered, "How? What else is there, Heather?" Eying her warily, and for one final time reentering prosecutorial mode, I offered my closing interrogative. "I need to know something, darling. When you first went to Peru you believed in love; that it truly existed, and that you might discover it someday. Do you still believe?"