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From the Blurb

The early 1990s in decaying, rust-belt Ohio sets the stage for a powerful tale of a woman grappling with the confines of sexuality, religion, and societal expectations.

She had it all – riches, a college honors program scholarship, a girlfriend – until her conservative, hyper-religious parents found out about the girlfriend and made her choose between conversion therapy and disownment. That was the end of her academic career.

Now, three years later, she meets a shy public reference librarian in a bookstore. He’s been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she’s starting her whole life over.
What ensues between the two neurodivergent lovers is magic.
Given that he’s about to become her tutor in the magickal and erotic arts, that’s only to be expected.

But at what cost?

The mysterious older man is all she could ever have wished for, but she may need to choose between her developing identity and the most profound love she has ever known.

“Master, teach me. I want to apprentice myself.”
I can feel him trembling. Am I trembling too? I must be. My voice is. But all I feel is him.
“Is this something you really want, or do you just want to learn how to be a dominant?” Shaking. God, he’s shaking. His raw need rips through me. “You did mention your former girlfriend wanting you to play the dominant. I can advise you without actually asking anything of you if that’s the case. Or is this about that conversation we had a while back about studying magic –”
“If I only wanted advice, I’d ask for advice. I don’t just want advice. I want you. Master, teach me.”
I take a deep breath.
Silence falls.
“I want that very badly,” he says at last.
“I’m yours for the taking. Please. Take me.”
The room is still. Too still. The very air is holding its breath.
“Please.”
The only one trembling now is me.
Set against a mystical academic backdrop with richly developed characters and a love story that leaps off the book’s pages, this scorchingly hot but highly literary erotic coming-of-age story is like nothing you’ve ever read before.
Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.

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Excerpt

Flat on my back. Tied down in the spread-eagle position again. Working on grounding and centering, and focusing energy, again. Grounding my energy involves associating it with a sensation of being secure, which, for some reason, means being secured, and no doubt figuring out the link between being secure and being secured will be a great moment of satori for me; centering involves me trying to concentrate and hold my meditative focus while he finds ways to distract me.

   We do this a lot.

   Today’s variation involved infinitely delayed orgasm – mine, of course. It’s been a good three hours. He’ll do something with his hands or tongue or with some item pulled out from his dresser drawer of doom that almost gets me coming, and then he stops just as I show signs of an impending climax. Worse, I have to help him do this. Now that my face and upper chest are stuck in what would ordinarily be a purely temporary state of crimson flush, I’ve been given leave to say “edge” whenever I get close to orgasm so that he knows when to pause what he’s doing to prevent me from climaxing. If I catch myself starting to orgasm before he notices or I warn him, and I let myself, there will be penalties, and I don’t feel like dealing with them today.

   I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s pulled this now. I’m on the edge of screaming, but it’s from frustration rather than pleasure, and of course I can’t do that, either, because this is energy work, and I am under silence.

      I’m almost tempted to ask myself if this is all worth it and if I really want to be here.

      But that’s just the frustration talking.

   I know I am more than a bundle of frustrated nerve endings. I am a soul, a soul that has a body, not the other way around. I am trying to hear my soul around the din of anguished nerves.

*

   November. The path in the nature preserve near my house is mucky from fallen leaves, and wet with freezing rain. A wind blows against me. I shiver in the chill.

   I am here because I like to hear the wind make the trees talk.

   Bare branches brush the mist and sky.

   My down parka is too short to allow me to sit down without soaking my jeans, so I take it off and spread it over the wet leaves that lie at the foot of the old oak tree. Maybe if I think warm thoughts, I won’t get hypothermia. I think about fire and sunlight and miserably hot summer days as I sit on top of my parka.

   At some point, I stop feeling the cold.

   Branches sway back and forth. Wind and rain kiss me sharply. Grey sky leans on me like a lover. I breathe clouds and stare into a half-dark murk. I imagine myself dissolving into the mist and rain.

   I am alone. I feel like I ought to be miserable and lonely, but I’m not – I am just alone, now, as nearly always. I am myself, alone, sitting at the foot of a large tree, with no company but the woods and the rain.

   This is how I spend my weekend afternoons.

   My peers spend their weekends going to the football and basketball games held by boys’ high schools, the masculine analogs to our own school for girls; or they go to parties, drinking beer and wine coolers they’ve managed to scavenge, and get trashed; or they shop and hang out in malls; or talk endlessly on the phone to each other. Some have boyfriends. Some manage to play around with their boyfriends, though probably stopping just short of anything that could result in an embarrassing pregnancy and expulsion from school.

   I meditate in the woods and talk with trees. 

   I am sixteen, and I have so little in common with my classmates and, for that matter, with my own family, now, that I sometimes wonder if I am an alien.

   I raise my gloved hand to clutch the silver unicorn pendant that hangs at my throat and feel cold throb at me like a pulse of lightning where the unicorn’s hooves and horn have pierced the yarn of my glove.

   As I start to give myself up to the late autumn cold, the trees shed their bark and become light. Forks of light grow down through my body and entwine with old roots. My hair pulses in unison with the glowing, swaying branches; and the rain that kisses and slaps my cheek, and the wind that drives it, are divine fire.

   Love, says the fire. Love.

   Love all.

   Be in love with all. Be love. Be.

   I say yes because there is no other answer to this imperative

   and I am love and the trees are love and the wind and rain and mud and cold are love and my parents and teachers and classmates are love and all the people of the Earth are love and the crow that flies cawing across the sky is love and we are all one. We are One and we forget, only to remember ourselves in Love

   and the world is afire and I rise, pulsing with hot light, feeling the embrace of wind and hearing the whisperings of trees.

*

   Bent over the couch. The hum of the air conditioner does not quite cover the sound of the riding crop slicing through the air or the crack of impact on my flesh. My grunts, which I am failing to hold in, are threatening to turn into whimpers. The temptation to jerk away is strong. I maintain my position and reassert my silence. It isn’t just discipline that holds me fast; it’s pride, and mixed in with the pride, a good deal of pigheadedness. I’m pretty sure Magister knows this and uses it as ruthlessly as he uses every other part of me.

     I don’t want to be a disappointment. I desperately, desperately want him to be pleased with me.

      My raw skin protests, but I ignore it.

      I am steel, being heated in the flame and hammered on the anvil. I will be strong.

*

   My mother reads my diary passage aloud: “We finally did it. After months and months of fumbling and talking about it, we finally did it. We finally kissed each other. I had no idea it was like this. I’m so happy. I know I’m a real girl now. My lips are still tingling.”

   The aide found my diary when she was cleaning my room, read the passage, and handed it over to my mother. I’m not sure how the aide, who attends the same church we do, and who my parents hired as a mutually beneficial favor because she needed work and my mother needed assistance with her daily activities, found it; I’ve been very careful about hiding it. My diary’s latest hiding place was under my bed in a box of unsorted papers and old school workbooks. It must have taken her a long time to ferret it out. From now on, I’ll have to keep the diary in my locker at school. Or maybe I could stash it behind the carriage house or the pool cabana.

   My father cuffs me across the cheek – not very hard, the humiliation hurts worse than the slap – and bellows, “How dare you abuse our trust this way? You let a boy touch you? What’s next? You’re a slut! You’re a whore!”

   My purity is everything. If I lose it, I will be nothing but soiled, ruined goods, and nobody decent will want to marry me. I have been foolish. Weak. A sinner. I have shamed the family…

   He rages on and on in this vein, while I cower. Of course, I’m cowering. What else would I be expected to do? I can’t stand up to them.

   My mother starts crying.

   If only this would stop.

   It never used to be this way. My father and I used to be so close. He called me the apple of his eye, once. He never used to scream at me. He used to be proud of me. He used to play chess with me, and Monopoly, and Risk. He used to read to me. We used to talk together about the Middle Ages. We went to museums together. We brunched together after Mass on the days that my mother could not go to church because she was too sick to get out of bed. On the rare days that she was healthy, we all went out to eat together.

   Then I started growing. My peers, from what little I’ve gleaned from listening in on the edge of their conversations, seem to merely be in the process of growing up. I’m growing away. I don’t know how to stop it from happening, or even if I should stop it from happening. I probably don’t have a choice in the matter. I almost wish I’d been born to different parents because my own parents seem to be not at all happy with the daughter they got stuck with. I can’t help being myself, nor can I stop loving who I love, and it was so good to finally find a boy – to find someone, anyone – with whom I had things in common, and it felt so good to kiss him, once we got past our nervousness.

   I no longer agree with my parents about everything anymore. Kissing before marriage, for instance, is something I disagree with them on. I see nothing wrong with kissing. I want my lips to be kissed.

   “You are grounded until further notice,” he says at last. “And starting tonight, you will do an hour of evening prayer and Bible study with me before bedtime. You will have nothing more to do with this boy who took advantage of you, and you will not have any further contact with boys until we say otherwise, since you obviously cannot be trusted to control yourself.” He sighs. “I’m very disappointed in you.”

   In a year I will go away to college, somewhere, assuming they will let me.

   It won’t be soon enough.

*

   I’m sitting at a carrel in the university library in the religion section on the second floor, a stack of books shoved to the side in a pile. The Zohar – several books of it. Isaac Luria. A medieval treatise on golems that he doesn’t have a personal copy of, which is why I’m doing my work here. My weekly readings usually include at least one obscure work that I can’t find on his bookshelves and have to look up elsewhere. Plotinus, who doesn’t seem to fit into this assignment on the movements and the evolution of the soul at all, but maybe I’m missing something; then again, maybe not. He’s given me unrelated tangential readings before as a way of keeping me on my toes. If I don’t notice that the readings are unrelated, then I’m not paying attention. Then again, sometimes the seemingly unrelated readings are related to the study material after all, and if I don’t catch that, I’m not paying attention. The bottom line is that I need to read everything thoroughly and think about it or meditate on it.

   Then I have to write him an essay, which I read aloud so that my findings can be critiqued – or, as some other, less thick-skinned people might call it, torn apart to the very stuffing. It’s a learning experience. Builds character. No, really, it does. On rare occasions, I’m able to conduct study in an area of esoteric philosophy which I happen to already know fairly well, and in those instances, the grilling session turns into a real debate.

   He seems to like that even better, interestingly enough.

   He started giving me assignments after I told him I missed being in college. Like every other aspect of my training, the assignments are difficult – they’re more difficult than some of the assignments I was given for my philosophy classes after I declared my major and started taking upper-level courses.

   I think it’s one of the sweetest things he’s ever done for me.

*

   “She’s four years older than you are; she’s a graduate student, while you’re only a sophomore. You let her take advantage of you? I don’t understand.” I was expecting him to scream at me, the way he did when he found out I’d kissed my boyfriend, but he has yet to scream. He’s so quiet I can barely hear his voice. His face is crestfallen. This is so much worse than screaming.

   “If it was my idea, how could she be the one taking advantage of me?”

   My mother is crying too hard to talk. At least she hasn’t run to the bathroom to throw up again.

   “Don’t you know how horrible a sin this is? It’s worse than murder. How could we have failed you so badly in teaching you right from wrong? You say you love her. You say this was your idea. You might not care about your own soul, but don’t you care about hers?”

   I swallow. Hard. I am not going to start crying in front of them. Not now. “Dad, I gave up Christianity for Lent. Your argument doesn’t mean anything to me.”

   “When did that happen? Was abandoning your faith her idea, too?”

   Actually, yes, it was, sort of, in an indirect kind of way, although I was already questioning it by the time she had her faith crisis and wound up giving up her Christian beliefs as part of the angst attack I had to talk her through. That was a long night. But that’s nothing that needs to be discussed with my parents.

   They found my long-distance phone bill, which, like all other campus communication, got sent to my home address during school vacations, before I could intercept the mail. Of course, they opened the bill. They said it was their responsibility to pay my college bills. They wanted to know why there were all those long-distance charges to a certain college town in the northeast part of the state, which my girlfriend happened to be living in because that was the location of her grad school. I can hide the truth, but I can’t tell lies. (My now ex-girlfriend, actually; we broke things off a week before I went home for the Christmas holidays. Not that that’s any of my parents’ business, either).

   And so, I was outed.

   “You need help,” my father says, and my mother nods tearfully. “We can get you therapy. It’s not too late. We were probably blessed by God to have found out about this situation as early as we did.”

   Eventually, they give me an ultimatum. I can go through professional deprogramming – then, once I am back home, I can undergo spiritual guidance from our parish priest, while they keep me under house arrest, with constant monitoring; or I can leave and never come home or consider myself part of the family again.

   If I allow them to take me under their control, they may eventually send me to the local public university and let me graduate. If not, they will mourn me as one dead, and that will be that. Either way, I won’t get to attend the private college I’ve been enrolled in anymore, since it’s several hundred miles away and puts me out of their reach, away from their control and their watchful eyes. I won’t be able to afford the tuition payments on my own, since my partial scholarship only covers half the tuition, and I have no income of my own. However, the deprogramming option at least lets me stay in their good graces. Sort of. And it lets me have a chance of eventually getting back into college, albeit a public university that has a reputation for taking any student that breathes and probably won’t be nearly challenging enough for me. Better gut classes at an undemanding, noncompetitive public university than no college at all. There isn’t really much of a choice if I care about my own interests.

   I start packing a bag.

   I hope I can hang out at the Greyhound station overnight until I can arrange transportation to my dorm to collect the few things I can’t bear to leave behind. I’d rather not spend the night on the streets. It’s January.

***