Never in her life had anyone spoken such things in her presence. Oh, she knew the words. She knew what they meant - every schoolgirl knew the words. But to hear them used, to feel them scything in her direction.
And to have them so erotic. To see what he described so clearly. To understand it so well.
Ladies and whores, he talked about. About the difference. About the need for ladies to be both. About what the right man knew to do with his lady behind the bedroom door, free her from her ladyship, from her courtly demeanor. Give her the chance to wallow and grovel and glow.
She could not understand how such talk could affect her so. But it had. It had. She had sat there - perched there, really - on the edge of her little chair, panting, chest heaving... Because she seemed to understand it. She seemed to understand just what release, just what euphoric abandon he meant. And when he went on and on spinning his pictures and images she saw her own skin glowing, her own fingers grasping, her own thighs wide and receptive and -
God help me! What is happening?
She didn't tell the details to the Team. She didn't. She glazed over it and hurried past it and she knew she wasn't meeting their eyes - his eyes - so she forced herself to look up and his gaze was steady and she believed he knew she had left something out.
And she believed he knew what it was.
It was when she decided she could simply hear no more that everything began to happen, that things began to whizz and spiral about her, that her life began to ricochet...
That her soul began its twist in the vise.
The Voice had stopped for the time being and she had risen, spontaneously, from her chair, jerked herself up and forward and away from this madness and the heavy air left by the silence and taken a step around the plant toward the sliding glass door to the library - she could do this! Just step around and through and no one would see her or even know she had been there...
And the other voice suddenly perked up and it was a voice she knew, knew well - had always known - and she couldn't help herself. She turned as she stepped and leaned wrong and her heel caught and she just careened into that awful plant, banging the branches with her shoulder and leaves went everywhere and by the time she had regained her balance - barely, with ankles out and knees together and wineglass spilling - she was among them. A semicircle of faces she couldn't meet were staring surprised looks in her direction and she heard that voice she had recognized again saying, "Davette!"
And she looked up and saw it was... Kitty!
Kitty and other girls she had grown up with. There was Patty and Debra and... Oh God! The embarrassment, because it wasn't just crashing through the shrubbery, it was the looks on their faces, the steaming-dreamy looks because they had been listening to that Voice, too, and their faces were flushed and their chest heaving and she knew they could see her own flush..
And, Oh my God, if Kitty was here, that meant...
"Davette," said Kitty again, "you remember Ross Stewart."
And he was there, looming over her, his black curly hair and ivory-white skin and black eyes so deep and forever and he took her free hand in his and said, with a wicked curling smile, "Davette! How often I've thought of you."
And that was that. Her lights went out. She fainted dead away.
It took her some time before she figured out exactly what had happened next. Ross must have caught her as she fell.
And though she was only out for a second she managed to have what seemed an endless dream - nightmare - or running through some awful wet-stoned maze of tunnels with someone she never saw but knew to be Ross Stewart, walking briskly after her and laughing.
But when she woke up she hadn't even' reached the floor yet and Ross Stewart still held her in his arms with his eyes boring through her and she panicked and she flailed at his chest and arms and she screamed.
It was the sound of her own voice that shook her out of it, that and Kitty bending over her saying, "Davette! Honey!" And as Ross lifted her upright - so easily! - and she saw all