I heard Victor sneer something over his shoulder about his shrew when he passed Waynette and me walking home from the bus stop.

I was fifteen. I thought he’d said his shrew was going to get me. I noticed congestion in my pubic region.

“Don’t pay attention to him,” Waynette warned.

I thought about shrews, about their conical snouts wiggling in dark corners, their slick bodies scurrying into holes, and I wanted to pay attention to him. I begged her to tell me what he’d said.

A few years later, it occurred to me that she may have only heard the sense of what he said, not the sound. It was the sense that scared her. It was the sense I wanted confirmed. My destiny seemed locked in those words.

Myku was a friend. When he touched me, memories of wrestling, of boonie-stomping, falling on each other, tangled in thickets of sword grass, lined my reactions with an asexual veneer.

I abandoned my virginity to him because he told me that he fantasized about me when he masturbated. There was a sense of the mystic in his interest.

Afterwards, I knew I needed some further instruction in sexual titillation. Physical experimentation and urgently polite skill practice weren’t enough. I needed to get to the root of sex, I needed to get sordid. I needed to relearn my body through those with whom I would copulate.

When we are alone in Mr. Graves’ office during his free period his approach is desperate, bizarre, arousing.

“I heard you’re doing some nasty things, this year, ichi-ban jo-san.” His pet-name for me refers, crudely, as one would refer to a prostitute, to my being his number one girl musician and playing the clubs at the Japanese hotels at night and on the weekend with a soft jazz band. “Heard you’d been going to some pretty dirty clubs, this year, drugs and such.”

I look at him, astonished, and laugh. I try not to be rude. The power of my body simmers. I have something to offer him.

“I’m not doing anything nasty.” I turn my head to the side, feigning interest in his bookshelves, and lower my voice. “But I wish I was.” My voice sounds odd, coquettish. I know I’m blushing.

Mr. Graves rocks back in his chair. It creaks. In this room, which doubles as a practice studio, the sound is subdued. He smiles. He strokes the side of his face with his fingers, taps them against his lips. I notice how fleshy his mouth is. I notice how relaxed his face is, how dangerous his body is. I know it is the body of a teacher. I am hoping it is the body of my teacher.

He rubs himself between his thighs. His legs are open, resting against the arms of his chair. He sighs. He is still smiling. “I heard Myku had you.”

I imitate his movement and look at him as though from under a hood, lifting my skirt with what I imagine to be seductive clumsiness. “I tried it with him. I was getting tired of candles.”

I lift my skirt high enough so that the crotch of my cotton panties is showing.

He stares at it. He slides his hand firmly between my thighs. I bend my knees, spread my legs. I feel one of his fingers force elastic aside and push into me.

“Unh!”

“Oh, baby, you’re wet,” Mr. Graves murmurs. He pushes further. I meet his thrust.

The office is tiny. I am standing and he is sitting. There are barely inches between us. My back is against the door. The door has a window framed in its upper half.

His breathing is deeper. Slower. He is smoothing his slacks persistently against his left thigh with his free hand. “When Myku had you, baby, when Myku fu-ucked,” his voice breaks, then recovers, “you, did you, uh, come?”

He leans forward. The chair creaks again. I am alert to his excitement. I cannot move, so I remain standing.

His hand creeps up the curve of my hips. I want him to run his hands up and down my torso, over my breasts, between my thighs. I want to be fully exposed.

He rests his hand on my hip. He pushes and I turn.

“Lift up your skirt, baby. We need to find out if it felt good for you.”

“Look back at me, baby. We’re going to teach you some things.”

“Got to get these out of the way,” he says, grunting and pressing. He pulls my panties down my legs. When they hit the floor, I step out of them.

His eyes widen and his smile fades when he sees me splitting lusciously before him. My hips undulate, learning why Tahitians move the way they do when they dance.

His hands clamp around my inner thighs. He brings me under restraint, pulls me apart with his thumbs and the sides of his hands.

“Oumnh,” I say.

“High and tight,” he murmurs, burying his face into my vulva. “Sweet and light,” he continues. “Mmmm, mmmm, I love the smell and the taste of the young ladies.”

I feel something brush the rim of my body, between my thighs. I remember a cold cement garage floor in the simmering tropical heat and Fritz’ tongue between my legs, suctioning every crevasse, looking for one more greasy morsel of dog food. Mr. Graves’ licks me dry as I lubricate. My face slides down the glass window. I butt further into my band conductor’s face.

“Let me get the shade, baby.” Mr. Graves stands and reaches above me, bringing a black-out shade down over the window. He checks the lock.

He slides his hands hard down the front of my torso, then brings them back up to my breasts. “I’ve got an idea what to do with these,” he huffs. He unbuttons my bodice, clips apart the front closure of my bra, and pulls everything aside. He takes each of my breasts in a hand and squeezes.

He flattens his hands over my breasts and rubs them against my ribcage, then pulls them out and pinches the nipples.

“Oh!” I cry. My chest grinds my breasts into his hands. My hands skim his. We push south. His fingers tease the hair on my mons.

“You’ve got a prominent mound, here. Ssssss,” he fingers for my slit. “You’re so swollen your little pleasure button is sticking right out there, begging to be pushed!”

He pushes it, a light stab. I arch my back and shiver.

“That’s the doorbell,” he says, pushing it again, massaging it.

When he enters me I wince involuntarily. He stops. “Move, baby,” he says to me. Myku never said that. “Move around me, baby, get used to me. Tell me when you want it all.”

The bell rings before I want it all, before I want to end this delicious, immodest tango.

“Think about how it feels. Feel it, baby, feel it,” he grunts as he punches me each time I contract.

I continue to see Mr. Graves. I am learning my body through his touch, my sense. There are no deals. I don’t need deals to make A’s, to remain on the marching squad, to qualify for honor band. I am a good musician.

I feel cocky, prancing over the bandstand steps, glancing back at him. We are on equal footing. I need to know every way two people can join. So does he. Does the lesson ever end? I hope not.

“You think you know so much, Miss Professional Instrumentalist, you conduct this number.”

I have never handled a baton, but I’ve handled music internally. I know what I want from the band. I know how to get it.

After practice he pulls the shade over the window. He pushes his chair against the back wall. He wafts his baton in the air, grinning at me. “So, I’ll bet you think you’re hot shit,” he says, weaving around me, maneuvering me into a corner.

I grin and back into the desk.

He grasps my arm and yanks me around.

My body is strong. It likes to test itself against force. I moan.

He tucks the hem of my skirt up into my belt. He pulls my panties down just below my buttocks. “Let me see that asshole of yours, girl.” He is running the smooth tip of the baton down the cleft between my cheeks.

“It isn’t dirty, baby, if you do it right. Your whole body shudders when you come, girl.”

I know what coming means, now.

I am better at being any number of women, now, including "“girl”.

“You’ll like this.” He picks my hands up off the desk and places them on either side of my cheeks.

“Show me where you think I’m gonna put this, honey. If you want me to do it, show me where you think I’m gonna put it.”

I pull my buttocks apart. My sphincter is defensively tight. Mr. Graves is smoothing something viscous over the tip of the baton.

“Hold yourself open, there, baby.”

I remember my mother saying, “Relax, Shenar, I need to take your temperature.”

I trusted her. I relaxed. When the bulb perforated me, I whimpered.

“It’s all right,” my mother cooed.

She thought I was in pain. I wasn’t.

The tip, surprisingly warm, smeary, rests on the edge of my sphincter, for a moment, then punctures me.

“Ahnnhh,” I sigh, rearing back, pulling my cheeks further apart, nudging into the tip.

Mr. Graves moves it back and forth through my sphincter and my colon, drawing a bow across strings. I play with the baton, my ass dipping and undulating, pressing the side of the smooth dowel against the lips of my anus. I look back at Mr. Graves.

He is standing behind me, concentrated, drooling onto his chin, holding the baton delicately at the middle, balancing it as he conducts it into and out of me, into and out of me. His other hand is latched onto his crotch, milking it.

“I’m gonna teach you what your ass’s been wanting, girl. When you’ve taken it up the ass, you’re gonna know what it’s like to be taken. I guarantee you, girl, when you learn how to read a man in your ass,” he moves the tip of his index finger, baggily gloved with a lubricated rubber, up the shaft of the baton; it is almost at my anus, “when you learn that you want,” he stabs the tip of his finger into me and jabs again, “a man up your asshole...”

“Hunnh, Hunnh,” I moan. I bounce my hips, easing into the encroachment. My anus feels like it’s lubricating.

“Stay still, baby, stay still,” Mr. Graves hisses into my back. He pulls the baton tip past his index finger and out of my asshole, hesitates as the tip exits and my sphincter nurses at his finger, stabs the tip back into me, then yanks it out.

As my ass shivers and sucks from the sensation. He draws his finger out, leaving the rubber behind. He pulls my panties and strokes my ass, catching the rubber, catching my colon’s attention.

“You think about that today, about how you want it to feel.”

Text & Graphics ©1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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