by Neal, Toby
I felt battered and torn and yet so excited I was guilty as the little plane climbed into the sky. Saint Thomas, cartoonishly beautiful, waved goodbye with its palm trees and blue water, dear family and forbidden lovers.
I took the shell from Rafe out of my pocket and opened the small white clam, two sides that made a heart shape when open. Inside was a tiny folded paper.
His writing was elegant, flowing, and the black cursive looked like it had been done with a fountain pen. I think of you often. Let’s stay in touch. His address, care of general delivery at the general store in our village, made me smile.
“I think of you often, too,” I whispered. And I dug my journal out of my backpack and started my first letter to Rafe, describing everything I saw from the air and my excitement about where I was going. In writing, I felt like I could talk to him, not like my tongue-tied stupidity and terrible blushes in person.
* * *
It took twenty long hours to make it to Boston. I arrived at night, when the city was a lacy shawl of colored lights around the harbor. The sidewalk outside the airport was warm in the early-fall night and smelled of gas fumes and the city, a whole new bouquet to get used to.
I hauled my suitcase with the broken wheel out onto the sidewalk and took my first cab ride ever, giving the address of my sight-unseen dorm to a driver with a turban on his head and skin so black it was purple.
I had expected my dorm to be fancier than it was, Northeastern University being the upscale place I had pored over pictures to see, but by the time I located the right brick building in the dark (still towing the broken-wheeled suitcase), the simple room in the gracious old building looked like heaven.
I fell face down on the bare mattress and slept fully clothed.
Chapter 3
Life at Northeastern University was colorful. Absorbing. Stimulating. Everything I’d hoped for. I was taking a general-ed slate of huge lecture classes and planning an eventual prelaw major. In French class I had a leg up because of our proximity to the French-dominated nearby islands and I was semi-fluent already.
On my second day I decided to adopt an imaginary persona as part of my Northeastern University experience. I’d be Juliette, exchange student from the French Antilles, and would speak with an accent. The red hair would throw everyone off and make me more intriguing, I hoped. It was a fun way to cast off my past and become someone new and sophisticated.
I shopped with my roommate, Shellie, a preppy girl from New York, at Boston’s thrift stores to totally redo my look. I bought berets and scarves and old jeans with peace signs on the butt and a pair of boots with high heels. I liked the look of my red hair streaming out from under a scarlet or purple beret over the old navy pea coat I wore everywhere as the cold deepened outside and the leaves changed color.
I didn’t have money because, even though I was on a scholarship, none of my living expenses were covered but the dorm room itself and a basic food plan. I got a job in the dining hall, serving students who didn’t have to have jobs. I spoke to them only in French in reply to their English requests, a silly form of revenge. I was at Northeastern, but I still didn’t feel like I belonged there. I might be smart enough, but one look at Shellie’s wardrobe, shoes, and furnishings showed me I was out of my league in every other way.
I’d write Rafe at my desk using a feather quill pen in my persona as Juliette. I wasn’t sure why I kept writing—perhaps it was because he was the only person who’d specifically asked me to keep in touch. At least, that’s what I told myself.
The phone in the dorm was exorbitantly expensive, so I didn’t call home. My parents called once, an ordeal during which Mom cried and Pearl demanded to know about all my boyfriends and my dad reminded me to stay chaste.
Because “Juliette” the flame-haired Frenchwoman was getting a lot of dates. I enjoyed the movies, ice-cream sundaes, swan-boat rides, and museum tours I’d been invited on, and as Juliette, I was able to shed my uptight missionary upbringing and affect worldliness. I even took to dangling a clove cigarette from scarlet lips, my beret cocked.
Under it all I still burned for Rafe. I worried because I hadn’t met anyone to equal him. I kept an eye out for the mail like Snoopy dangling off of the cartoon doghouse, and Rafe’s first letter arrived after a month. I closed myself into the bedroom of our suite with the studying sign on the door so Shellie wouldn’t poke her head in to see what I was doing.
I tore open the fat missive.
Dear Ruby. I’m picturing you in your purple beret as Juliette the girl from the French Antilles, and may I say it’s brilliant? I know how hard you’ve tried to be your parents’ daughter, but there’s something dramatic in you, something wild…I glimpsed it that day we took a hike, and I think you glimpsed it, too, and it scared you. I stayed away the rest of the time you were still on the island because I could see I would be nothing but trouble for you, with the goals you had and departure on your mind. But it was hard, and I suffered more than I expected to, and I’m selfish enough to hope you lost a little sleep, too.
I’m glad you’ve found a safe way to let that wild side out to play, one that doesn’t get you into too much trouble. But I do regret I didn’t have longer to know that girl. You did something to me, and I’ve not been the same since.
I pressed my hand over my open mouth. It shocked me that Rafe understood me so completely, that he knew exactly what he’d been doing when he ate that mango off my hand, and that he’d been so bold as to tell me I’d affected him.
I love your letters! They are so full of all the adventure and experience you’re having, all you are learning and seeing and doing. As for me, things are much the same in Saint Thomas. I work all day, keeping in shape climbing the coconut trees on all your parents’ rental properties and cutting off the coconuts, working on the boat I’m crewing next spring back to California, and surfing every day now that it’s the surf season. At night I have trouble sleeping, because I think of you and wonder what we might be to each other. Love, Rafe.
My hands were trembling as I folded the rest of the pages and stuffed them back in the envelope, afraid to read any more. Afraid for his hold on me to get any stronger, when his honest words affected me this way.
I needed to go out with someone else, I decided. Someone suitable, Northeastern University-ish, an intellectual. Someone more in line with the self I was inventing over here. Someone who could knock Rafe right out of my mind.
He came into my life that very afternoon, a tall young man who’d shyly struck up extra conversation each day as I served him behind the cafeteria line, my red tresses restrained by a hairnet and my curves packed into a long, tight white apron with the strings wrapped twice around my waist.
“Can we get together sometime?” he stopped the food line to ask me. He was nice-looking, with soft pink lips and a lot of black curly hair. The old-fashioned tweed jacket he wore had leather patches on the elbows like a professor. I knew he’d be a gentleman by the whiteness of his long-fingered hands as they brushed mine when he took the cardboard lunch plate.
Couldn’t be more different than Rafe. Perfect.
“Mais oui. Call me.” I took the ballpoint pen out of my apron pocket and scratched my number on his napkin. He retreated to a table with his friends. Much ribbing and backslapping went on over there while I went on serving, cool as only Juliette could be.
He called the landline in our suite that evening, and my roommate answered it since most calls were for her. She dragged the phone into my room. “It’s for Juliette.” She grinned.
I picked up my unlit clove cigarette and waggled it at her, taking the receiver. “Oui?”
“Juliette? This is Henry. The guy from the lunch line.”
“Ah, Henri.” I pronounced his name in the French way, and I heard how much he liked that in the smile in his voice as he said, “Can I take you for coffee tomorrow?”
“I’m studying, Henri, but I could meet you to do something at night,” I said, making my roommate raise her eye
brows because she knew that I was an untouched virgin with wavering morals and a terrible fire in the belly. But not even she knew about Rafe. Telling anyone might make whatever was between us more real.
“Oh, excellent. I know a wonderful fish market I can take you to.” We set up a time to meet, and I hung up, locking eyes with my roommate.
“I’m going to date this guy for real,” I told her.
“Have fun with that. Just remember the first time can be painful,” she warned. “Tell me before you do it and I’ll loan you some K-Y jelly.”
“Merde, I didn’t say I was sleeping with him!” I exclaimed, blushing.
“That’s what serious dating means.” She frowned. “And you must be the last virgin at this college. No one would believe it if I told them.”
“That’s what Juliette is for,” I said. “So I can not be who I am.”
I worried that I was, indeed, the last American virgin. While my morals had been wavering and I was eager to find out about sex, I knew I wanted my first time to be not only mind-blowing but with someone I was truly in love with, which meant it might be awhile.
Henry, with his earnest gray eyes and tweed jacket, was the first Northeastern possibility I’d met. He was a grad student and surprised to find out I was a freshman. I could tell he liked me too much for me to play around with his emotions, so halfway through dinner I broke character and told him I was Ruby Michaels and I was from the Virgin Islands.
“I’m so glad you told me the truth—but can you keep talking to me with that little accent and say my name that way you do?” Henry asked with a smile, and he picked up my hand and kissed my fingers very gently.
I was thrilled to feel a tingle.
“Mais oui, Henri,” I said, and he kissed my hand again. The tingle I felt was nothing like the lightning bolt Rafe had zapped me with, but to my oversexed body, a tingle was great.
I liked Henry a lot. He was working on conjoint PhDs in psychology and music, and we talked about matters of the mind, which was what I’d come to Boston for. We went to dinners at a fish house, where he bought me my first Maine lobster, a Greek restaurant where I learned about falafels, and an Indian restaurant where I learned to love naan and more. Finally, he took me to his off-campus apartment where he lived with other grad students, and after he played a song on guitar he’d written, we kissed.
His lips were sweet from an after-dinner mint, and soft on mine. They seemed to be initiating a conversation—do you like this? Or this?
I found I did, and let him know. Our tongues touched. The tingle was very pleasant.
That evening, after he dropped me off at my dorm, I still had a ton of homework, but I was floating on air because I was finally getting over Rafe.
Just in time for more letters from him to arrive.
Damn you, Ruby. I’m trying not to think impure thoughts about you, but it’s hard. You were so amazing that day we spent together. Sassy, smart, and you ran so hard you got my heart rate up in more than one way. I think over every moment of that day and wish I’d really savored it more. The way you looked when you stepped out from under those vines, like a wood nymph, that one strand of vine tangled in your hair, your cheeks red, those green eyes flashing.
And those breasts heaving, right there in front of me. God, woman. Because no matter that you’re only eighteen, you’re all woman. Those breasts, so perfect, so round and full, always made me think of what it would be like to bury my face in them, nuzzle them, suckle them, and as I did so, work you with my fingers until you were screaming your release.
Because I know that’s in you, my Ruby girl, a living flame.
I can’t believe I was noble and just let you go, didn’t take what I knew you were offering without knowing you were…but I also know that, woman though your body is, you’re still a girl and innocent of what you’re capable of.
I just hope I get to be the one to awaken that in you. Next summer I will be in California. Surely it wouldn’t be that hard for us to meet. Because wanting you is driving me crazy. And you should know that your friend Jenny, while pretty and certainly willing, just isn’t my type.
Until my next letter I’ll be waiting for you. Wishing for you. Wanting you.
My hand had crept into the stretchy waistband of my sweatpants and found its way to my aching nubbin of pleasure as I read the letter.
Damn that man. I dropped the letter, threw myself back on the bed, and worked myself unabashedly to a shivering, pulsing, silent climax while I fantasized Rafe nuzzling, biting, and sucking my breasts while working me with his fingers.
That was the fantasy still playing in my mind as I kissed Henry in his room an afternoon or two later.
“Juliette,” he whispered, and because it wasn’t me, Ruby, he held in his arms, and because I couldn’t have Rafe, I let Henry kiss his way down my neck with those soft, gentle lips of his.
He unbuttoned the black long-sleeved blouse I wore, gently undoing each button down to my navel and holding it open to gaze at my breasts in their black lace cups. The chill afternoon light fell across the expanse of creamy skin, my long red hair tangling on his chest and across his legs as I sat on his lap, and even I knew the sight was gorgeous. I shut my eyes and arched back across his arm, thrusting my breasts forward and bending myself into an alluring shape as old as time.
“You’re gorgeous,” he said. I felt shy but determined as I proceeded with my seduction, knowing that there was no way Rafe would ever be able to do this with me as far away as he was.
I shut my eyes and thought of Rafe, allowing Henry to set those soft full lips on the pulse point at the base of my throat, those lips that had spoken poetry to me and sung me Dylan songs on a guitar older than I was, and I welcomed his kisses. He took off my shirt, never letting me off his lap, and he sucked and teased and bit at my breasts still in their lacy cups, awakening them for the first time to all their sensual potential.
He eventually took the bra off as I made little panting noises and wriggled on his lap, aching to be touched, but he didn’t go there. He smoothed the rounds of my breasts in his hands and put his face between them, kissing and squeezing them up beside his slightly rough, whiskery face. He kissed and teased my blush-pale nipples until they were dusky rose with need, and I was writhing and moaning on his lap just from the way he’d aroused them.
“Henri, Henri,” I moaned in my French accent, but it was Rafe’s face I saw behind my closed eyes.
Henry didn’t take off his clothes, didn’t touch my aching core. No, he did nothing but worship my breasts.
A feeling had begun in me, as if my breasts were filled with white-hot electric wires and the nipples were the contact points. They were getting hotter and hotter, firing uncontrollably and connected directly to my aching, pulsing center, and finally he pressed the two breasts together so that the nipples touched, and he took them both in his mouth at the same time, sucking hard.
I exploded in my first-ever man-induced orgasm across his jeans-clad legs, a feeling like a shower of sparks erupting in my brain and rippling across my whole body so that I twitched and jerked like I was having a seizure. I cried out with the ecstasy of it.
I could somehow see myself in his eyes in that moment and it added to my pleasure: my skin like ivory satin, naked from the waist up but still clothed in my jeans. Tousled, multihued long red hair caught in the buttons of his shirt, spread across his chest, and trailing on the floor as my breasts bounced and trembled with the waves of pleasure bucking through my body.
But in the secrecy of my mind, I was in Rafe’s arms, and it was his hard mouth on me that took me over the edge.
Afterward I sat up and turned to straddle and kiss Henry. I asked if I should do something for him. He said no, just taking me there was pleasure enough, and he smiled. I could tell he thought he was collecting some sort of sexual favor I would owe him.
I knew that, and was unmoved by it. I thanked him as if he’d opened a door for me, which in a way he had. And he helped me put o
n my bra and button my shirt back up. He walked me home through driving sleet under a big golf umbrella to my warm dorm.
In the shower in my bathroom, I cried.
Because I didn’t feel in control anymore. Of my body, of what it needed, and who it had chosen. I cried because it wasn’t Rafe who had taken me there for the first time.
I wrote Rafe that I had met someone. His name is Henry, and he is the sort of man I should be with. Solid. Will have a steady life, with a good job helping people as a psychologist, and he’ll fill a home with beautiful music he writes and plays. I like him and I want to more than like him. I let him take my shirt off and make love to my breasts.
But you ruined it for me, because all I could imagine was your mouth on me, your hands on me, and in my mind it was your lap I was laid across as I flew apart and disintegrated into nothing but feeling. All I could think of was you, Rafe. Damn you for coming into my life when you did and doing what you did to me!
I folded the letter with hard, quick movements that made me slit my finger on the letter’s edge. I didn’t care that there was blood on the paper I stuffed into the envelope and addressed and stamped and ran out into the first snowstorm of the year to mail.
If he was going to torture me, I’d torture him right back.
The holidays were coming and I didn’t have enough money of my own saved up to return to the Virgin Islands for Christmas. I was devastated when my parents told me they couldn’t afford to bring me back, either, not least because now I couldn’t see Rafe.
Henry got more serious, bringing me little gifts, trying to spend time with me every moment I would let him. I liked the company, someone to spend time with, and he was older, took charge of our activities and knew all sorts of places and things to do in Boston. I liked how much he cared for me, selfish as it was. It was nice to have a boyfriend. But I never let him touch me that way again, always having an excuse to leave, cutting things short after a few kisses.
