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The warm hands on her shoulders were unexpectedly gentle and she pulled free at once, determined that no one would see her like this. The second time Dominic managed to haul her to her knees and enfold her in his arms, pulling her close to him. Only then did she realise that he had come after her, in spite of everything.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry, Geraldine,” he was groaning quietly into her hair, hugging her as if he would never let go.
She clung to him, shaking, more afraid than she had been in decades. It took an effort to control the tears but she knew beyond doubt that if she did not tell him the truth tonight, she never would.
He’s laid his soul bare, said the reasonable voice in her head. Now it’s your turn, Lady Priestess.
Emotion left her voice husky and raw but between the gasps of cold night air that ripped into her body, she forced out words into his ear; cold, dark, evil words that she had never believed she could tell anyone, least of all him.
“I… had… his… baby. I… I… was… just a little girl, Dominic. I… d-didn’t understand. I… I d-didn’t want… him… in me… I w-was scared… scared of the dark. I… I got in… in the big bed… with him. He woke up.. in the night… he woke up… but he… he th-thought I w-was… Mum. He… he kept calling… her name… ‘Sally… oh Sally, I’ve m-m-missed you…’”
She felt his sharp intake of breath and buried herself deeper in his embrace. If he pushed her away now she was not sure what she would do. Dominic was silent for a long time, just holding her, carefully as if he imagined she would break.
“It… it hurt…” she exhaled barely audible. “The first time… it… it hurt so much. B-but he… kept doing it… he w-wouldn’t stop. H…he said… ‘It’s all right, Sally. It’s o-okay… it’s just been a while, you’re a bit tight… p-perfectly n-n-normal…’ and I was only –t-t-welve… I d-didn’t know! I didn’t… didn’t sleep in his b-bed anymore… but he c-came to mine… Friday nights… when he got back from the pub… he came up and… and… I pretended I was asleep… but I heard him… unfastening his… his trousers… and he… pulled back the c-covers… and…and…”
“Shh-shhh,” he whispered at last, kissing her forehead. “It’s all right. I understand.”
He kept his arms around her though, holding her securely to his body so that she could feel his warmth seeping through her own skin. Dom was never cold. Gerry hiccuped and gulped back the fresh flood of tears as she snuggled deeper into his encircling arms.
“They all talked… at school… all the girls… they all talked about… about sex… like they knew what was what… like it was all a big laugh… And I thought; ‘If only you really knew! You w-wouldn’t be laughing then.’ B-but I could never say… because then they would know… and… dad would get in t-trouble… and maybe I’d… I’d be put in a home.
“And… I… I started putting weight on… I just thought I was getting fat… I had funny periods, you see… I didn’t notice when they stopped… not at first. But then I fainted… playing hockey… passed out on the playing field… I was bleeding… remember coming round in the office… and… and the school nurse asking me… didn’t I know? Did I not know… that I was pregnant? Looking at me like I was some kind of… slut, letting someone… someone do that.” She stiffened, struggling to sit up in his arms and he let her have some space but did not quite release her. “I c-couldn’t tell them, Dom,” she whispered, shaking her head incredulously. “I just couldn’t. I lied… told them it was boys, I didn’t know their names… more than one… I didn’t know which… I didn’t know names.
“They put me in a nursing home, a place for young girls who got that way. I didn’t see Dad, or Stairs until after she was born. I didn’t see anyone… no one I knew…
“When she came it took forever… I screamed until my head ached… it hurt so much… more than it had even when he put her in there… I just remember pushing and pushing and wishing I was dead. And then it was all over and I could hear her crying.
“They let me hold her, just for a minute or two…” Gerry’s voice broke and she began to cry again. Gently, Dominic thumbed the tears from her cheeks, still gazing at her with that solemn, quiet intensity, as though he could soak up all of her pain and hold it for her. She wished that it was true. His lower lip was bleeding and she remembered then that she had almost punched his lights out. She could not work out what he was doing here, holding her as if none of that mattered.
“She… she was beautiful,” Gerry whispered in a broken voice. “I couldn’t believe she could be so b-beautiful. I told them I wanted to call her Sally, after Mum…. The midwife said… she said… ‘Her foster mum and dad will want to give her their own name’… and then they took my baby away… and I never saw her again.”
She wept more freely now and felt Dominic’s arms move back around her, holding her tightly, stroking her hair in wordless consolation. Gerry was glad that he did not try to say anything, that he did not feel the need for words that would make no difference. She relied on him to know best; she had done so for the better part of twenty-five years.
“I…I was just fourteen,” she croaked at last. “They… they didn’t let me go back home. Dad… got… a carer. They said…. ‘Diminished Responsibility’… after mum dying and everything… he wasn’t capable… couldn’t keep me in check. They put me in a special boarding school… just girls… girls like me… slutty girls that couldn’t keep their knickers up!”
“Hey!” he admonished, drawing back to look severely at her all of a sudden. His voice was soft and slightly husky. “You know that’s rubbish, and so do I.”
“That’s what the locals said,” Gerry told him, rubbing her nose on the sleeve of her blouse and not caring if it made a mess. She probably looked a fright. “They said it even when they knew we must be able to hear them.”
She hiccuped again. It hurt too much to cry any more. All at once she felt weak and foolish and wished that she had kept quiet. Dominic pulled her to his chest wordlessly and rocked her like a child, ever so gently.
“Do you hate me?” she whispered at last.
“Don’t be silly,” he murmured in her ear. “Why would I hate you?”
“I hit you,” she reminded him.
“It doesn’t matter. I probably deserved it.” He shrugged awkwardly.
“You’ve been very quiet.” Gerry pulled away at last, forcing herself to sit up straight. She risked another glance his way. His eyes were red-rimmed and glittering like low evening sunlight after a rainstorm; she had not realised that he had been crying too.
“I don’t know what to say.” He forced a helpless smile.
“That must be a first!” she observed, weakly attempting to deflect the enormity of her confession with humour.
“Not quite,” he said, more soberly. “Are you going to be okay?”
Gerry nodded, no longer trusting herself with words. She felt that she had probably said enough this evening to last for the rest of her lifetime. The confession had drained her emotionally and physically. As she leaned against him, wrapping her arms around his neck she was surprised to feel that it had also drained her of her silent rage. She no longer felt angry, only enormously tired.
“Did you never go back home?” He pressed his lips to her hair and she felt the words buzz like insects against her scalp.
“Not until I was a lot older,” she told him, her voice muffled by his shirt collar. “I finished my schooling at a Convent in Ipswich. Then I went to Art College in Suffolk and took a foundation course over the next two years. When I was eighteen they said that I might visit my dad. I stayed in Ipswich, I met this man, and we got married. I married him so that I wouldn’t have to go home. We lied about my age… said I was twenty-one. It was a registrar’s office and we got two strangers in off the street to be witnesses, like in the films. Afterwards we went to a hotel, and I was shaking so much when he came to bed. I told him it was my first time. I was so frightened… so tense, that he couldn’t even get in me. He was a bit narked, but he wasn’t ever cruel. He never did manage to get inside me.
“We got a flat in Burnham on Crouch, but he got fed up of waiting and he left me after a month. He never once tried to force me. We got a divorce within six months of the wedding and I went to London. I got a job collecting tickets and sweeping up in a gallery. Then I got into the Slade and… everything changed. My life was different. I discovered that you could be… be with women…” She smiled ruefully, snuggling up to him.
Dom’s lean body felt good against her own, she did not want to let go, not just yet, but it had to be getting late. It was pitch dark now. She could not even see the moon.
“They’ll be worried about us,” she ventured at last. “Your friends…”
“I told Sheila we might be back late,” he soothed, still stroking her hair.
“What time is it?”
“There’s no rush,” Dominic told her. He nuzzled her cheek, then tilted his head and touched his mouth to hers. Gerry tasted the coppery tang of blood as his lips moved softly and wetly against her own. She opened her mouth to protest and his tongue found its way between her teeth. She thrust her fingers through his curls and pulled him harder against her as he kissed her more intensely. Dominic tasted of mint and whisky and menthol cigarettes. Gerry’s tongue twined around his, fighting its way into his mouth as he leaned against her, bringing her down slowly underneath him until she was lying on her back in the lush grass at the foot of a wide-boled, rustling Oak tree.
His lips parted briefly from her own long enough to whisper; “Are you all right?”
“Mmm…” she nodded, emphasising the affirmative as he knelt over her, one slim thigh between her legs, pressing quite high up, against her body. He ran a searching hand over her breasts and kissed her again as his fingers deftly unbuttoned her blouse for the second time that night.
She shivered, but not from the cold this time around; or with trepidation. A tremor of nervous excitement was rising in her veins as his hands explored her body, then his lips followed. Geraldine had stopped reckoning how many times she had run this particular scenario through her mind, always stopping before it went too far.
Dominic kissed her insistently from the curve of her left collarbone, upwards over her throat and then back down the right hand side of her neck, over one shoulder and down over the upper slope of her right breast.
The tingling in her blood was virtually unbearable by the time his skilful digits found her bra clasp and carefully released it. Gerry murmured his name in a low, warning tone but he ignored it. Boldly he peeled off her blouse and removed the flimsy undergarment with a knowing smile. He was a pale shape against the leaf-mottled sky as he bent his head to her right breast and applied his lips to her stiffening nipple, suckling and stroking with his clever tongue. She caught her breath, then exhaled it tremulously as he kissed his way to her neglected left breast and repeated the process.
As his hands moved down to caress her thighs and guide the hem of her (probably ruined) skirt higher, she wriggled and hissed; “Dominic! What if someone comes?”
“I thought that was the point!” he chuckled, looking down at her rather quizzically.
“You are a very wicked man,” she admonished.
“Of course,” he acknowledged her, applying his lips tenderly just beneath the curve of her exposed breasts. “What is more, I think that you rather like it!”
His breath was warm and quick across the skin of her belly as he kissed his way to a point below her navel. Gerry gasped again, softly as the backs of his fingers circled stealthily over the lacy front panel of her knickers. A shiver of pleasure and anticipation coursed through her and she made no attempt to stop him as he kissed her abdomen through the lace, then pressed his mouth against her pubic mound. His fingertips brushed the damp silk of her crotch and Gerry writhed urgently, uttering a little whimper that was neither encouragement nor protest. She could feel the longing building steadily inside her and knew that he was perfectly capable of stoking that ember of pleasure into a hot, white flame of ecstasy. She had not forgotten the events of her best friend’s fortieth birthday. That astounding night he had overwhelmed her by exploring with his tongue in places no gay man should even know existed, let alone be able to stimulate so thoroughly. And she had almost been too drunk to stop him.
Even so, she still recalled every detail with painful clarity, right up to the moment when he unzipped his pants and tried to mount her and she brought both knees up hard in an uncontrolled, defensive reaction that damn near crippled him. The memory of his screams and the look of anguished incomprehension on his face as she struggled away from him still plagued her to this day.
She could tell that he had not forgotten it either, by the way that he stopped briefly in his oral exploration of her stocking tops and knelt up, gazing at her with wide, wary eyes that were almost all pupil. For a few moments, he was utterly still and silent, a pale shade in the gathering gloom.
“What is it?” Gerry whispered at last.
“You know what it is,” he answered gravely.
She nodded at once.
“Are you going to stop me before I go too far?” he wanted to know.
Gerry swallowed hard. She could feel her heart trying to hammer its way out of her chest. If she told him ‘no’ then there was no turning back. Last time had been dreadful enough, almost worse than the night when she turned down his proposal of marriage. Certainly it had been more painful – for Dominic at least!
“I don’t know,” she managed to force out, her voice no more than a squeak of sound.
“Do you want me to carry on?” he asked, a worried expression on his face.
“I don’t know.”
He uttered a little huff of incredulous humour.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she said, without even the slightest pause. The word tumbled from her mouth before she could even censor it. She felt the need to qualify it, even as he leaned over her, lowering his face to hers once more. “I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“I’m glad,” he whispered into her mouth, as he kissed her. “I don’t think I could take another direct hit.”
“If I tell you to stop…” She broke off, feeling foolish, even as he slid his hands into her undergarments, stroking the smooth skin of her hips and thighs appreciatively, like an antique collector with a piece of Meissen porcelain in his grasp.
“Whatever you say, darling.” Dominic’s head was bowed over her breast, but she could hear the smile behind his words.
Geraldine closed her eyes and put her past behind her.

Description
The warm hands on her shoulders were unexpectedly gentle and she pulled free at once, determined that no one would see her like this. The second time Dominic managed to haul her to her knees and enfold her in his arms, pulling her close to him. Only then did she realise that he had come after her, in spite of everything.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry, Geraldine,” he was groaning quietly into her hair, hugging her as if he would never let go.
She clung to him, shaking, more afraid than she had been in decades. It took an effort to control the tears but she knew beyond doubt that if she did not tell him the truth tonight, she never would.
He’s laid his soul bare, said the reasonable voice in her head. Now it’s your turn, Lady Priestess.
Emotion left her voice husky and raw but between the gasps of cold night air that ripped into her body, she forced out words into his ear; cold, dark, evil words that she had never believed she could tell anyone, least of all him.
“I… had… his… baby. I… I… was… just a little girl, Dominic. I… d-didn’t understand. I… I d-didn’t want… him… in me… I w-was scared… scared of the dark. I… I got in… in the big bed… with him. He woke up.. in the night… he woke up… but he… he th-thought I w-was… Mum. He… he kept calling… her name… ‘Sally… oh Sally, I’ve m-m-missed you…’”
She felt his sharp intake of breath and buried herself deeper in his embrace. If he pushed her away now she was not sure what she would do. Dominic was silent for a long time, just holding her, carefully as if he imagined she would break.
“It… it hurt…” she exhaled barely audible. “The first time… it… it hurt so much. B-but he… kept doing it… he w-wouldn’t stop. H…he said… ‘It’s all right, Sally. It’s o-okay… it’s just been a while, you’re a bit tight… p-perfectly n-n-normal…’ and I was only –t-t-welve… I d-didn’t know! I didn’t… didn’t sleep in his b-bed anymore… but he c-came to mine… Friday nights… when he got back from the pub… he came up and… and… I pretended I was asleep… but I heard him… unfastening his… his trousers… and he… pulled back the c-covers… and…and…”
“Shh-shhh,” he whispered at last, kissing her forehead. “It’s all right. I understand.”
He kept his arms around her though, holding her securely to his body so that she could feel his warmth seeping through her own skin. Dom was never cold. Gerry hiccuped and gulped back the fresh flood of tears as she snuggled deeper into his encircling arms.
“They all talked… at school… all the girls… they all talked about… about sex… like they knew what was what… like it was all a big laugh… And I thought; ‘If only you really knew! You w-wouldn’t be laughing then.’ B-but I could never say… because then they would know… and… dad would get in t-trouble… and maybe I’d… I’d be put in a home.
“And… I… I started putting weight on… I just thought I was getting fat… I had funny periods, you see… I didn’t notice when they stopped… not at first. But then I fainted… playing hockey… passed out on the playing field… I was bleeding… remember coming round in the office… and… and the school nurse asking me… didn’t I know? Did I not know… that I was pregnant? Looking at me like I was some kind of… slut, letting someone… someone do that.” She stiffened, struggling to sit up in his arms and he let her have some space but did not quite release her. “I c-couldn’t tell them, Dom,” she whispered, shaking her head incredulously. “I just couldn’t. I lied… told them it was boys, I didn’t know their names… more than one… I didn’t know which… I didn’t know names.
“They put me in a nursing home, a place for young girls who got that way. I didn’t see Dad, or Stairs until after she was born. I didn’t see anyone… no one I knew…
“When she came it took forever… I screamed until my head ached… it hurt so much… more than it had even when he put her in there… I just remember pushing and pushing and wishing I was dead. And then it was all over and I could hear her crying.
“They let me hold her, just for a minute or two…” Gerry’s voice broke and she began to cry again. Gently, Dominic thumbed the tears from her cheeks, still gazing at her with that solemn, quiet intensity, as though he could soak up all of her pain and hold it for her. She wished that it was true. His lower lip was bleeding and she remembered then that she had almost punched his lights out. She could not work out what he was doing here, holding her as if none of that mattered.
“She… she was beautiful,” Gerry whispered in a broken voice. “I couldn’t believe she could be so b-beautiful. I told them I wanted to call her Sally, after Mum…. The midwife said… she said… ‘Her foster mum and dad will want to give her their own name’… and then they took my baby away… and I never saw her again.”
She wept more freely now and felt Dominic’s arms move back around her, holding her tightly, stroking her hair in wordless consolation. Gerry was glad that he did not try to say anything, that he did not feel the need for words that would make no difference. She relied on him to know best; she had done so for the better part of twenty-five years.
“I…I was just fourteen,” she croaked at last. “They… they didn’t let me go back home. Dad… got… a carer. They said…. ‘Diminished Responsibility’… after mum dying and everything… he wasn’t capable… couldn’t keep me in check. They put me in a special boarding school… just girls… girls like me… slutty girls that couldn’t keep their knickers up!”
“Hey!” he admonished, drawing back to look severely at her all of a sudden. His voice was soft and slightly husky. “You know that’s rubbish, and so do I.”
“That’s what the locals said,” Gerry told him, rubbing her nose on the sleeve of her blouse and not caring if it made a mess. She probably looked a fright. “They said it even when they knew we must be able to hear them.”
She hiccuped again. It hurt too much to cry any more. All at once she felt weak and foolish and wished that she had kept quiet. Dominic pulled her to his chest wordlessly and rocked her like a child, ever so gently.
“Do you hate me?” she whispered at last.
“Don’t be silly,” he murmured in her ear. “Why would I hate you?”
“I hit you,” she reminded him.
“It doesn’t matter. I probably deserved it.” He shrugged awkwardly.
“You’ve been very quiet.” Gerry pulled away at last, forcing herself to sit up straight. She risked another glance his way. His eyes were red-rimmed and glittering like low evening sunlight after a rainstorm; she had not realised that he had been crying too.
“I don’t know what to say.” He forced a helpless smile.
“That must be a first!” she observed, weakly attempting to deflect the enormity of her confession with humour.
“Not quite,” he said, more soberly. “Are you going to be okay?”
Gerry nodded, no longer trusting herself with words. She felt that she had probably said enough this evening to last for the rest of her lifetime. The confession had drained her emotionally and physically. As she leaned against him, wrapping her arms around his neck she was surprised to feel that it had also drained her of her silent rage. She no longer felt angry, only enormously tired.
“Did you never go back home?” He pressed his lips to her hair and she felt the words buzz like insects against her scalp.
“Not until I was a lot older,” she told him, her voice muffled by his shirt collar. “I finished my schooling at a Convent in Ipswich. Then I went to Art College in Suffolk and took a foundation course over the next two years. When I was eighteen they said that I might visit my dad. I stayed in Ipswich, I met this man, and we got married. I married him so that I wouldn’t have to go home. We lied about my age… said I was twenty-one. It was a registrar’s office and we got two strangers in off the street to be witnesses, like in the films. Afterwards we went to a hotel, and I was shaking so much when he came to bed. I told him it was my first time. I was so frightened… so tense, that he couldn’t even get in me. He was a bit narked, but he wasn’t ever cruel. He never did manage to get inside me.
“We got a flat in Burnham on Crouch, but he got fed up of waiting and he left me after a month. He never once tried to force me. We got a divorce within six months of the wedding and I went to London. I got a job collecting tickets and sweeping up in a gallery. Then I got into the Slade and… everything changed. My life was different. I discovered that you could be… be with women…” She smiled ruefully, snuggling up to him.
Dom’s lean body felt good against her own, she did not want to let go, not just yet, but it had to be getting late. It was pitch dark now. She could not even see the moon.
“They’ll be worried about us,” she ventured at last. “Your friends…”
“I told Sheila we might be back late,” he soothed, still stroking her hair.
“What time is it?”
“There’s no rush,” Dominic told her. He nuzzled her cheek, then tilted his head and touched his mouth to hers. Gerry tasted the coppery tang of blood as his lips moved softly and wetly against her own. She opened her mouth to protest and his tongue found its way between her teeth. She thrust her fingers through his curls and pulled him harder against her as he kissed her more intensely. Dominic tasted of mint and whisky and menthol cigarettes. Gerry’s tongue twined around his, fighting its way into his mouth as he leaned against her, bringing her down slowly underneath him until she was lying on her back in the lush grass at the foot of a wide-boled, rustling Oak tree.
His lips parted briefly from her own long enough to whisper; “Are you all right?”
“Mmm…” she nodded, emphasising the affirmative as he knelt over her, one slim thigh between her legs, pressing quite high up, against her body. He ran a searching hand over her breasts and kissed her again as his fingers deftly unbuttoned her blouse for the second time that night.
She shivered, but not from the cold this time around; or with trepidation. A tremor of nervous excitement was rising in her veins as his hands explored her body, then his lips followed. Geraldine had stopped reckoning how many times she had run this particular scenario through her mind, always stopping before it went too far.
Dominic kissed her insistently from the curve of her left collarbone, upwards over her throat and then back down the right hand side of her neck, over one shoulder and down over the upper slope of her right breast.
The tingling in her blood was virtually unbearable by the time his skilful digits found her bra clasp and carefully released it. Gerry murmured his name in a low, warning tone but he ignored it. Boldly he peeled off her blouse and removed the flimsy undergarment with a knowing smile. He was a pale shape against the leaf-mottled sky as he bent his head to her right breast and applied his lips to her stiffening nipple, suckling and stroking with his clever tongue. She caught her breath, then exhaled it tremulously as he kissed his way to her neglected left breast and repeated the process.
As his hands moved down to caress her thighs and guide the hem of her (probably ruined) skirt higher, she wriggled and hissed; “Dominic! What if someone comes?”
“I thought that was the point!” he chuckled, looking down at her rather quizzically.
“You are a very wicked man,” she admonished.
“Of course,” he acknowledged her, applying his lips tenderly just beneath the curve of her exposed breasts. “What is more, I think that you rather like it!”
His breath was warm and quick across the skin of her belly as he kissed his way to a point below her navel. Gerry gasped again, softly as the backs of his fingers circled stealthily over the lacy front panel of her knickers. A shiver of pleasure and anticipation coursed through her and she made no attempt to stop him as he kissed her abdomen through the lace, then pressed his mouth against her pubic mound. His fingertips brushed the damp silk of her crotch and Gerry writhed urgently, uttering a little whimper that was neither encouragement nor protest. She could feel the longing building steadily inside her and knew that he was perfectly capable of stoking that ember of pleasure into a hot, white flame of ecstasy. She had not forgotten the events of her best friend’s fortieth birthday. That astounding night he had overwhelmed her by exploring with his tongue in places no gay man should even know existed, let alone be able to stimulate so thoroughly. And she had almost been too drunk to stop him.
Even so, she still recalled every detail with painful clarity, right up to the moment when he unzipped his pants and tried to mount her and she brought both knees up hard in an uncontrolled, defensive reaction that damn near crippled him. The memory of his screams and the look of anguished incomprehension on his face as she struggled away from him still plagued her to this day.
She could tell that he had not forgotten it either, by the way that he stopped briefly in his oral exploration of her stocking tops and knelt up, gazing at her with wide, wary eyes that were almost all pupil. For a few moments, he was utterly still and silent, a pale shade in the gathering gloom.
“What is it?” Gerry whispered at last.
“You know what it is,” he answered gravely.
She nodded at once.
“Are you going to stop me before I go too far?” he wanted to know.
Gerry swallowed hard. She could feel her heart trying to hammer its way out of her chest. If she told him ‘no’ then there was no turning back. Last time had been dreadful enough, almost worse than the night when she turned down his proposal of marriage. Certainly it had been more painful – for Dominic at least!
“I don’t know,” she managed to force out, her voice no more than a squeak of sound.
“Do you want me to carry on?” he asked, a worried expression on his face.
“I don’t know.”
He uttered a little huff of incredulous humour.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she said, without even the slightest pause. The word tumbled from her mouth before she could even censor it. She felt the need to qualify it, even as he leaned over her, lowering his face to hers once more. “I don’t want to hurt you again.”
“I’m glad,” he whispered into her mouth, as he kissed her. “I don’t think I could take another direct hit.”
“If I tell you to stop…” She broke off, feeling foolish, even as he slid his hands into her undergarments, stroking the smooth skin of her hips and thighs appreciatively, like an antique collector with a piece of Meissen porcelain in his grasp.
“Whatever you say, darling.” Dominic’s head was bowed over her breast, but she could hear the smile behind his words.
Geraldine closed her eyes and put her past behind her.