At first she thought, Oh, no, it won’t work. Another mistake. It won’t work. Not at all. Because nothing touches me, nothing reaches me, and I remain forever detached.

Megan held her close. They lay side by side and she saw Megan’s eyes shining catlike in the darkness, and she felt the gentle pressure of Megan’s breasts against her own. Megan kissed her, lightly, and Megan’s legs moved to brush against her own legs and thighs. Another kiss, and again the pressure of Megan’s warm body.

Something familiar, something known. A fine female body against her own body. A partner not different, but similar. Megan’s mouth, soft and faintly sweet like her own mouth, meeting hers gently but firmly. Megan’s chest, not bristling with hairs and corded with muscles, but soft and smooth and warm and blooming with the sweet luxury of Megan’s full breasts.

Then knowledge came, knowledge, awareness. She was not a cold woman. She was not frigid. She was responding, going soft and liquid inside in the silky mechanism of sexual response, and this response was a specific one, a special response to Megan.

There was a short period then of fear, of tension, of fright. For two years she had meticulously buried sexual response under a deadening blanket, and the sudden change scared her. She had spent too much time schooling herself another way, teaching herself that she was dead and empty inside. Now Megan was teaching her to be a woman, and she was afraid to give in either to Megan or to herself.

“Easy, baby. Easy, Rhoda, darling Rhoda. I love you and you love me and we are together. My flesh and your flesh. Easy my darling.”