Sin takes many forms and Chloe has indulged most of them. Her lovers have been eclectic and interesting. I hope Tom holds her interest.

I worry that her quest for respectability will lead to heartache – for him, at least, and maybe even her. And yet, when they come to dinner, they glow, wearing a mantel of impatience to leave, return home to bed from where they have obviously just tipped out.

Ray and Tom talk about war. Tom is a healer, while Ray is trained to kill. They talk and we listen and try not to be cynical or weary about our powerlessness in the face of all they have witnessed, of scenes that we cannot begin to imagine or understand. I sense a shift in us all, as maturity and discipline descend. A new era is upon us. Change will happen and Tom and Chloe will lead the way.

That last night before Chloe took her leap of faith, I served safe lasagne and Prosecco and worried about Ray and envied Chloe’s glow and tried not to be brittle in the face of her new reflection. The new face.

Later, as I cleared the table, Ray long unconscious on the sofa, me still worried and kind of needy, knowing Chloe and Tom had gone back to have sex, I considered our collective lives up to that point, and thought about Chloe’s apprehension about meeting Tom’s sister. Again, I feared for her. She’s not an ordinary girl. She inhabits an unusual world. Tom and Chloe met on New Year’s Eve, her usual whirlwind captured him, sucked him into her core and they spent that first night together. A new day, a new year, a new world.

‘We made love, Lizzie.’

‘So?’

‘Made love. Had proper, loving sex, without a strap-on or buggery.’

‘Really?’ I knew my eyebrows had disappeared into my hairline.

‘Don’t do that, we agreed that extreme expression would cause premature ageing.’

Chloe giggled and I tried to recall if I’d ever heard her giggle before. She laughs. She has never giggled, and shock creased my brow into parallel lines until I laughed too and wept inside for the loss of my wanton girl. Robbed by a man with a real job, with a real life, with real prospects. Jesus! For a man that even Chloe’s mother would approve of.

     …as recorded by me.

Mother and father sent me to boarding school. Father worked as a diplomat, and they travelled the world. They left me in rural England at a convent school and returned to visit from time to time. During holidays, I sometimes joined them in far off exotic places. I learned to love and longed for the smells, sights and sounds of the countries I visited. I still haven’t lost my yearning for travel. Mostly, I spent breaks staying with friends at their houses.

I adored school. Unlike many boarders, I thrived. I knew my power – even then. I harnessed it, held on to it and let it develop until I was ready to wield it. Experimental power, experimental sex. I started with fantasy and masturbation, and when I was fully prepared, totally familiar with my own body, with the taste and feel of budding flesh and cells, I focused on Sister Nuria and unleashed my newfound knowledge.

My early education was a teaching and learning curve because Sister Nuria also had a lot to learn. Teaching and learning, hand in glove (she smiles). One, indistinguishable from the other, always going forth into new territory, just like an exploration of a new land. The local village was a treasure-trove of adventure. Populated with eager boys, panting to remove my panties, desperate to fondle my breasts, plunge a mouth with a tongue or a quim with a small, hard cock.

I made choices early. I created a ‘to do’ list, topped with Sister Nuria. The boys in the village featured later, but putting them at the lower end of my shopping list didn’t stop me teasing them on trips into town. I was merciless. I ignored the leader of the pack and started with the runt. I’ve always had a weakness for weakness.

As you well know, I prefer the taste of girls but the individual flavour of semen appeals to me almost as much and I set out to experience as many flavours as possible.

Exeats were easy to earn. Sister Nuria’s orgasm bought my sorties into town and I’d usually work hard enough to buy a couple for my friends too. My best friend was not keen to lose her virginity, either to me or to a boy, and I didn’t push her. I liked her. A lot. I respected her prudish ways. She acted as lookout whenever I used the farmer’s barn to teach my runt my new learning…

I don’t know who I am, Lizzie. Sometimes I think I am a girl and at others I wonder if I am a combination of girl and boy. A strange combination of neither one nor the other.

‘You’re too feminine to be boy-like.’

‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes no. Don’t you think?’

‘No. You’re a girl. Look at you.’

She faces the mirror and peers. She tries to see what I see. What you see, Dear Reader? She falls short. Her knowledge of her exterior self is the only area in which she falls short. She is a double-first in all other areas. She left the rest of us standing.

Her tutor marked her out as soon as she arrived at her college. A lecher I often think of him. His lustful avaricious nature barely concealed beneath the veneer of respectability of his position. He seduced her in his rooms on a wet afternoon in October, piercing her with the flaccid symbolism of his superiority in all areas, bending her over his knee to receive a bare-bottomed, bare-handed spanking. Delivering well-timed, well-aimed blows until he was panting with exertion and she was just panting.

He ruined her that day. Her need for abuse had been stimulated from an early age, nurtured by the nuns at school and honed by her Don that autumn day. She cannot see what I see. The layers of armour in which she has clothed herself since the flesh of her bottom was rouged with the roiling blood of her submission.

When she writes, she works like an addict works at getting the next fix. Manic activity in the hours when most of us are sleeping. An insomniac, she does her best work between the hours of 2.00 and 4.00 am. She emerges spaced-out from a period of frenzied activity and it takes a while before she returns to normal. Whatever that is.

For a few days after she completes a project she’s like an addict coming down from a high. Hyperactive, jumpy, her five senses more acute, she’s fixated, until she’s worked herself to the edge of exhaustion. She stops, as if she’s reached the summit after a long climb into the clouds. Falls into bed and sleeps for hours and hours. She snores sometimes, too, but denies it, naturally.

At Chloe’s convent, she learned Latin in a building that had a ‘grandeur that made learning Latin seem right and proper.’ Friar Dunstan’s lessons fascinated Chloe, and in her book about her, that’s not actually about her, Bella recalls the Friar’s instruction about the Rubicon. The river on the far frontier of the Roman Empire. After Caesar had chased his enemies to the river bank, he gazed at the torrent, gathered his troops and gave them permission to turn back. But once they crossed the rickety bridge all future progress would be by force of arms.

There’s no turning back after you have crossed the Rubicon. Chloe’s the sort of girl who rarely looks back, when she makes a decision, she sticks to it.

Chloe is complex, she’s the devil that tempts you with the most kissable lips, she’s the angel that achieved an A* for her essay on Caesar’s military tactics…She is the girl every girl wants to be, even if they don’t know that.

To be continued (promise) – Lizzie Woodham

A Girl’s Secret Life – copyright Elizabeth Woodham, 2014

     *    *     *

Girl Trade

available at your

local Amazon

The post Ripened for Sin appeared first on Erotic romance writer Chloe Thurlow.