Message-ID: <7804eli$9804132300@qz.little-neck.ny.us> From: john_dark@anon.nymserver.com Subject: {SJR}"The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane 06B"( bf mF mF+ )[20/52] Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Note: This message was posted by a secure email service. Please report MISUSE OR ABUSE of this automated secure email service to . Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-ID: <6gmso3$rbm$1@sparky.wolfe.net> The following story is posted for the entertainment of adults. If you are below the age of eighteen or are otherwise forbidden to read electronic erotic fiction in your locality, please delete this message now. The story codes in the subject line are intended to inform readers of possible areas that some might find distasteful, but neither the poster nor the author make any guarantee. You should be aware that the story might raise other matters that you find distasteful. Caveat lector; you read at your own risk. These stories have not been written by the person posting them. Many of those e-mail addresses below the author's byline still work. If you liked the story, either drop the author a line at that e-mail address or post a comment to alt.sex.stories.d. Please don't post it to alt.sex.stories itself. Posting the comment with a Cc: to the author would be the best way to encourage them to continue entertaining you. The copyright of this story belongs to the author, and the fact of this posting should not be construed as limiting or releasing these rights in any way. In most cases, the author will have further notices of copyright below. If you keep the story, *PLEASE* keep the copyright disclaimer as well. This particular series is by Santo J. Romeo. That might even be his real name. The version that I have copied used his initials, and I have followed suit. It is more a tragic story of coming of age than simply a sex story, and individual segments might not contain any sex. The entire story, however, is a hot one. ======== **** WARNING **** WARNING **** WARNING **** THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL, EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF 10 YEARS. IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON- FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS. IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT. THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR. SO--HEY, YOU CAN COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO. ==================================== THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE by S.J.R. sjr <73233.1411@CompuServe.COM> ============ PART 6B: Thursday was overcast and chilly. Martha Jane and I made a long trip over two local bus lines to the campus of Memphis State, which was farther out than I had ever gone in my explorations. When we arrived I was both excited and apprehensive. There was so much to it! Surrounded by a well-to-do suburb and even a few estates, the campus of several Georgian buildings and dormitories spread over a rustic landscape that alternated between broad green pasture and heavily forested alcoves of pine, maple, oak and magnolia. I'm certain I must have seemed like a spellbound infant. Tongue-tied, I stayed at her side like a puppy as Martha Jane, one arm carrying a shopping bag loaded with books and notebooks, led me down the long rambling drive toward the main library. I spent so much time looking up and stretching my neck to take in everything that I tripped over every curb and twig along the way. Martha Jane finally had to lead me by the hand. At the library's columned entrance I ran to the door and tried to yank it open for her. Sur- prised by its weight, I was jerked back against the door and had to lean far backward to open it again. She laughed, "Don't be in such a hurry." Inside, I was overcome by the solemnity and silence in the large and spacious building, which was far more imposing than the small branch library I knew in my neighborhood. Martha Jane walked ahead of me to the front reception desk. I followed, my neck craning and my eyes agape at the high walls solid with shelves and books. My tennis shoes squeaked softly on the tile floor and echoed into the ceiling. I was so flabbergasted that I walked right into her as she stopped to have the receptionist check her bag. I shifted to avoid standing on her feet, apologizing so loudly that my voice shot back at me several times over, startling me, and I had to lower my volume. Turning around and trying to take it all in, I took a step or two in each direction to try to see down the paths of shelves and oak tables to my left and right, only to stumble backward with a loud clunk into the face of the reception desk. Martha Jane said quickly to the receptionist, "He's going to be with me. He's not a student or anything, he doesn't have an i.d.--" The bespeckled, matronly woman smiled at Martha Jane and handed her back the shopping bag of notebooks. The lady looked exactly the way I had always imagined librarians would look. "That's perfectly all right," the woman said warmly, and she peered down at me cheerfully through her bifocals. "Well, young man, this must be your first visit." Martha Jane laughed and blushed. "Yes, it is. I'm afraid he doesn't have his bearings yet. Bumping into everything..." "Oh, don't you worry, he'll find his way around. You enjoy yourself, young man. If you're interested, there is a child's section right over there in that far corner just past the card catalog cabinet." I asked, "Where do you have the newspaper stacks? I guess I'll start with The New York Times Index? Do you have it back to the 1920's?" She looked at me and then at Martha Jane, a little surprised. Martha Jane grinned at her. "He likes newspapers." "Oh, how interesting. He's your son, is he? Oh, I'm sorry, you certainly don't look that old. Your brother?" "No, he's my..." "Student," I interjected, somewhat formally. Behind me, out of the lady's sight, I felt Martha Jane poke a finger in my back. "Oh, I see. How nice, bringing your students to the library in person, that's a wonderful idea. Well, now, you get settled and then come back here and I'll show you to the periodical stacks." "Thank you," I said, and Martha Jane also whispered a thank you and led me by the hand into a small alcove with a large writing desk upon which she parked her shopping bag. She smiled wryly at me as she removed her sweater. "You're my what? My student?" "It had a certain status." She blushed. "I'm glad you spoke up. I had to stop myself because I almost said you were my boyfriend. I'm certain she would have got a rise out of that." I smiled broadly. "Now, you've been in libraries before, so you know what the general setup is. I'll be working right here if you need anything, or anybody at the big front desk can help you." She left me on my own. A young woman at the front desk gave me a brochure with a map of the building and directed me to the card catalog filing cabinet. On first seeing it I was taken aback. So many drawers! And in each drawer were hundreds of index cards, some packed so tightly they had to be shoved back firmly to be read. I didn't know where to begin. There were so many choices. The problem was, I wanted to see everything at once. Going through them became stultifying after a while; I wanted something more substan- tial, something I could hold in my hands. Leaving the card catalog as a hopeless case of too much to absorb at once, I moved to the stacks themselves. Looking over the titles, I couldn't imagine how any book or index or subject might be missing from this building. Following the map, I took the elevator to the next floor and found myself confronted with hundreds of shelves, thousands of books. The musk of paper filled the room. And on the next floor I encountered the same odor, and the same endless maze of stacks and shelves and labels and volumes. On the elevator again, to yet another floor of the same thing. And from there, a curled iron stairway leading to still more, and then to another wing of more floors, more tiers of books. I grappled with one thick book that almost pulled me to the floor as it slid from its shelf. It was a weighty volume of nineteenth century photographs. Opening its large pages separated by translucent tissues which themselves had chipped and yellowed, I found myself in the grip of an eerie fascination with the faces of the people in the pictures. Starkly and stiffly posed, their eyes seemed alive and knowing--a strange and hair-raising sensation, because these people had posed for the photographs in the 1870's. There were long shots of tailcoated, booted men in front of banks and post offices and on street corners. And there were pictures of the streets. New York City in 1876. An interior of a fancy restaurant, the shot taken so that the tall windows lined up along the right and rays of sunlight drenched the floor and the tables, leaving the corners of the room deep in shadow. I could smell the wood frames of the windows, hear the photographer prompting carefully as he held the shutter open for the long exposures required in those days. The streets and the build- ings and the rooms struck me as being oddly familiar; I was not surprised at seeing them, and felt that I was seeing nothing new. Everything seemed to be exactly in its proper place. The surprise was my knowing that it was so, that I had seen these buildings and their arched windows and tall shadowed doorways before. A rustle of clothing startled me. I looked up. Martha Jane was strolling toward me. I had been studying the book so closely that my eyes watered and the back of my neck was cramped. "You've been gone for hours," she said. "I looked everywhere for you. Do you have any idea what time it is?" "I'm sorry," I stuttered, finding my mouth dry. "Find anything interesting?" "This," I said, holding the book open with both hands. I touched my fingers to a full-page photograph of 4th Avenue, in downtown Manhattan, taken in 1881. She looked at it. "What about it?" "I've..." I was startled as the words came out of my mouth, almost on their own accord. "I've been here." "Here? You've been on this street before?" I nodded. "Speedy, this is...Hon, this street is in New York City. The picture was made sixty or seventy years ago. Maybe it reminds you of Adams Street in Memphis. It looks a lot like it." I shook my head slowly, not believing it myself. "No," I muttered. "I mean it feels like...I was here, on this street. This street." "You mean, like deja vu. You know about deja vu?" "Yes. I remember looking it up. This is what deja vu is?" Standing beside me, she gazed into the picture. I saw her eyelashes flutter as she scanned the page from corner to corner. I felt embarrassed. It was true: the photograph was from another century, from a place I'd never seen. She looked into my eyes with her piercing blue-green orbs floating in white. "You feel you were there? Really?" I nodded. "I've had feelings like that too, hon." Her words both astounded and intrigued me. For a moment both of us stared at the photograph. Then she said, "Come with me. I want to show you something." She led me down the iron staircase and then down another, to a floor of magazine stacks and dozens of metal shelves piled with loose papers and brochures. She took me to a corner where her hand went straight to an enamel-backed issue of a National Geographic. "Look at this," she said mysteriously, and flipping the pages along her thumb she seemed to know exactly the page she wanted and found it right away. She held the magazine open and motioned for me to take it. "Look," she said quietly. It was a grayed, gold-bordered monochrome photograph. The woman was in a shawl and held a child wrapped so heavily that only part of its forehead could be seen. In the background was what appeared to be a desert. The picture was taken from the knees up. The woman wore what looked like a light gray (pale blue? pale yellow?) heavy shift tightly girdled at the waist with a white cord. The folds and shadows of the loose garment revealed that she was slim and deli- cate. Looking suspiciously toward the camera, her bright eyes projected a strange mixture of fear and concern. Her left arm cradled the child closely; but her right was extended across the front of the child's wrapped body, facing the camera, and the sleeve of her garment fell back to reveal her long, slender white arm with her fingers spread around the child's covered head. She breathed, "It's me." And as I continued studying the woman, who did not look like Martha Jane except for her remarkable eyes, Martha Jane stretched her right hand across the page and spread her fingers in the same pose that was in the picture. I was silent, numbed. Their arms and hands looked alike. She mused aloud, "There's probably nothing to any of it. It's just a feeling I have when I see this picture. I've looked at it hundreds of times. But always, I get the same feeling. I've seen that desert. And those mountains back there on the landscape." She sighed, taking the magazine from me. "Or maybe I'm just going crazy or..." She jammed the magazine back in its place and added soberly, "...maybe I just take myself too seriously." I felt giddy at the prospect that I wasn't the only creature in the world who had otherworldly sensations. Martha Jane reinforced that when she said, "Speedy, I hope you don't think I'm just weird, but I feel those things all the time." I said earnestly. "I feel the same way sometimes." As she led me out of the room she confided, "Speedy, you're the only person in the world I could have shared that with." "What do you think it means that we both feel those strange things?" She put a finger to her lips and whispered mischievously, "Shh. It means we're both crazy." I whispered back, "I won't let the lady at the front desk know." "Come on, let's go to the cafeteria before they close and get a late lunch. I'll introduce you to the wonderful world of institu- tional food." The cafeteria was closing when we arrived, so we picked out cold sandwiches and cokes in plastic cups and went outside to sit on the massive steps of the administration building. From there most of the campus spread before us, as far as we could see, into a dense wood beyond a grove of magnolias. A chill, early spring wind picked up and rustled the stiff leaves of the magnolias. Some sparrows and mockingbirds hopped around us and we pitched them the crumbs that were left from our lunch. Martha Jane was finishing the last of her coffee, which she referred to as "college soup." "Horrible stuff," she said, sipping. "It's addictive. Ruins your tummy. Gives you insomnia." "Why do you drink it?" I asked. "Because it's oh so necessary, hon. When you get into college you'll find out how very very needed it is. I was falling asleep taking those notes in the library. Sometimes you think you'll go into a coma, but you just keep on working." She finished the coffee and sat one step lower than me, her knees raised and her head propped on them. She looked up at me sideways. "You're finally leaving the project. I'd give anything to be leaving, though I know I will someday, not long from now. My mother's dating now. She met a very nice man in the office supply business. He has a beautiful home right out there, near where you'll be living with your mom and your dad. He's in a richer neighborhood, so I know it's not quite the same, but...it'll be yours, and you'll have your own place. You're way too old to be living in a closet, you have too many interests. I should think you'd be very happy about all that. But you're not." I shook my head. I pinched a small piece off the remains of my sandwich and pitched it to a lone mockingbird a few steps below. "Why not?" she asked gently. I didn't respond, holding back the real answer. Finally I just shrugged. "Is it because I won't be your neighbor anymore?" I nodded. "Speedy, that's very nice. But you can't give up everything just to live next door to me. I'm hardly there anymore, anyway. And when I can, I'll be moving away again. Then what would you do?" "Well...I'll stay in the project until you move again." "And then what?" I shrugged. "And then what?" she repeated. "I don't know." "Speedy, listen to me--" I tried to remain casual. Stubbornly I said, "You're my friend." "I know, hon, but both of us have to get out of that place sooner or later. Both of us need homes, not just a hole in a wall." "You're my friend," I said again, offering another crumb to the white-trimmed mockingbird, who chased greedily after it. "I know, but you'll have other friends. A whole neighborhood full of them, not like those rough kids downtown." "You're my friend," I said again, stubbornly, and pitched another crumb. "And you'll be in high school before long, at Christian Brothers, and there's so many smart kids there just like you--" "Don't make me cry!" I demanded, crying and then choking it back in the same instant--but not soon enough to stifle the single tear that dripped down my face. My nose ran and I sniffed loudly. "Honey!" she whispered in amazement. "Here..." She produced a kleenex from her sweater pocket and reached up toward my face. But I took it from her. "No!" I said stubbornly, and wiped my nose. "No, I won't cry. I will...not...cry. I'm too old to cry. I don't have any business crying." She started to rise but I put my hand on her shoulder, so she moved up only one step and was sitting next to me. "Baby," she crooned, "you've been holding this back from me for a long time, haven't you?" "There's nothing to hold back. You're my friend. That's all. I've lost friends before. And I've liked people who didn't like me. And you told me things you didn't like about people and how much work you're doing and how you can't spend all your time with them. I know you have to leave the place. I know you want a home. This week I went down to the river front and watched the sun, and I saw the whole world in front of me and I wondered how big it was, how much of it is out there and how much I had to do. How much I had to learn. It's your world, too. I know you'll leave, or I'll leave. And I'd never try to stop you. I'd never try to take that away from you and I'd never blame you, like I did last time. 'Cause I know it's not because of me, it's because of what you have to do, it's what you want. And because--" I blew my nose hard, once and for all. "Because I know you don't like schmucks, and I don't wanna be a schmuck!" "Speedy..." I would not look at her. I could feel her looking across at me, leaning toward me. "I don't have to actually *like* leaving my friend on the other side of town, do I?" I complained. "I don't have to be a schmuck, but I don't have to like it either." For a long minute she didn't say anything, and I refused to let her see my face until I felt I was totally in control again. I felt her arm go around my shoulder. She put her cheek to mine for a second then pulled away from me. "Look at me," she said. When I hesitated she said, "Look at me, hon." I turned to her and she had her teeth and jaw set in a playful, mock-tough, happy little smile. She said, "C'mere" and put both arms loosely around my neck and pulled me to her slightly so that our foreheads were touched. "Hey, bud, answer one question." "Yeah?" "Did you mean everything you just said?" "Yes." "You didn't just get it from some movie somewhere?" "Hey, lady...This ain't Hollywood." "Speedy...Steven...don't ever let me call you a little boy again. Don't even let me think it. If you catch me doing it, remind me of today. Promise?" "Promise." "I've got a proposition for you, Mister Ricci." "Proposition?" "Yeeeahh...We still going to the movies tonight?" "If you want." "Yeah, I want, but after that...I want you to spend the night with me." She stuck her tongue out, far out, and licked my nose. I wiped it off with the kleenex. "What if my folks come home early or something? Tomorrow's Friday." "Then we'll stay up and keep watch." "You don't have to. Stay with me, I mean." "Yes I do, hon. Yes I do." ==================================== THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE by S.J.R. PART 6B -30- -- +--------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `------------+ | story-submit@qz.little-neck.ny.us | story-admin@qz.little-neck.ny.us |