253: She let her hand . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 2 continues
She let her hand drop onto Luther’s leg, and she allowed it to slip a couple of inches downward along the inside of his thigh. Luther was surprised. He looked at Lorna. The color was high in her cheeks. He kissed the blush along her cheekbone. She couldn’t trust herself to say or do anything, so she just kept looking upward, at the stars. Luther talked on, but his voice had become merely a low mumble, a part of the evening sounds on Lake Serenity: whispering breeze, lapping wavelets, chirping crickets, mumbling Luther. Lorna was paying no attention to what he was saying. All her attention was on her hand and his. When his hand moved, her heart leaped, and she moved her hand. When his hand stopped, she drew a breath and stopped hers. When his hand flexed, her whole body stiffened, and she squeezed Luther’s leg, so slightly that he may not even have noticed it.
Lorna was thrilled. She felt the anticipatory thrill that she felt before anything that she expected to be pleasant, but more intensely than ever before. There was the nervousness she knew, the burning tremulousness in the muscles of her hands and arms and face and belly. The coldness in her chest. The flutter in her heart. There was the familiar sense of floating, intensified by the fact that she was floating.
Luther was fussing with his trousers, she realized, and then quite suddenly he had taken her hand with his other and pushed it into his trousers and folded her fingers around his erect penis. This was so surprising and welcome a development that Lorna smiled unthinkingly in her delight. Her curiosity, always great, had become enormous since Luther had added couples to the cuff link line. So tightly were the couples coupled that Lorna couldn’t see much of the man, though she examined the papier-mâché models thoroughly, and she carved faithful representations of what she saw, something like an inverted mushroom, its button top between the man’s legs, a bit of stem, and dark mystery where it disappeared in the woman. Lorna seized the opportunity Luther had given her and began a thorough exploration, running her fingers along and around his penis, feeling for details with a sculptor’s touch. She drifted into an abstracted exploration, an exercise in genital cartography. It was as if the rest of Luther had disappeared, and she were alone with his penis and the lake and the night and the stars, and she hardly noticed that he had pulled her skirt up and brought his hand between her legs.
Luther was ecstatic. He hadn’t hoped for this eagerness. He began poking and probing with his forefinger, and a rush of pleasure ran through Lorna, and she drew a sharp breath and raised her hips almost involuntarily, rubbing herself against Luther’s hand, Luther’s forefinger, and that’s when things began to go wrong.
It was that hand. The one good finger was in her, the thumb was poking around, hunting for her clitoris, and the three stumps were tickling her. A wave of revulsion ran through her, but the tickling made her want to giggle. She seemed to see the whole thing, as fully and clearly as if she had to carve it, and she imagined carving the thumb, and the forefinger, and the stumps, and herself. She turned toward Luther with terror in her eyes, her mouth in a twisted grin. He misinterpreted her look. “Now, Lorna,” he began, “don’t be frightened. Don’t cry out. I won’t hurt — ”
And then she was ashamed. She shouldn’t be revolted by his hand, she told herself. Even if she were, she shouldn’t have let him see it. “Oh, Uncle Luther,” she said. “I’m so ashamed — ”
“There’s nothing for you to feel ashamed about, Lorna,” said Luther. He began pulling his trousers down, and then he was on top of Lorna, pulling at her clothes. “Just relax yourself,” he said. “Look at the stars, and think lovely thoughts, and it won’t hurt. I promise — ”
But the feeling of abstraction, of detachment, had vanished, and Lorna was suddenly aware of everything and full of doubts and fears, like a person awakened by a thunderclap, frantic, sure that everything is about to fall apart. Out of all the questions she was asking herself, one of the unlikeliest came through loudest: What about Bertha?
“What about Bertha?” she said. “Bertha loves you, Uncle Luther. I know she does.” To her surprise, Lorna found that she felt horribly disloyal. Poor Bertha, she thought. She’s homely, and she’s in love with Uncle Luther. She must have been afraid of me for years —
“Bertha! Bertha is nothing. She’s — Lorna?”
Lorna was pushing him away, struggling to get free of him, reaching for the oars, calling out, “No, no. Stop it! Get away from me!”
[to be continued on Friday, May 6, 2022]
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In Topical Guide 253, Mark Dorset considers Settings: Lake Serenity from this episode.
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