Message-ID: <10939eli$9805061357@qz.little-neck.ny.us> From: john_dark@anon.nymserver.com Subject: {SJR}JDR"The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane 10C"( bf mF mF+ )[36/52] Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Note: This message was posted by a secure email service. Please report MISUSE OR ABUSE of this automated secure email service to . Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-ID: <6iou3n$ors$1@sparky.wolfe.net> CORRECTED VERSION The previously posted version of this chapter was cut off in the middle. This should be the entire thing. Sorry for the inconvenience. 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 belong 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 10C: By ten-fifteen that night we returned to Martha's place and set the tiny dining table with a bottle of wine, three cheeses, and two boxes of imported crackers. We kicked off our shoes. Martha struggled with the corkscrew while I fetched two glasses. "Begin," she said. Almost two hours later I was slurring my words and pacing the living room with a cigarette in one hand and a wine glass in the other. I wasn't drunk, but I was "loose" for the first time in my brief life. Little did I suspect that a small amount of wine would extract from me such a detailed two-year autobiography. Defenseless, and listening to my own long, rambling sentences, I felt almost removed from myself, as if I were some one sitting beside Martha, who remained perfectly sober and attentive as she curled lazily on the sofa with her glass and crackers. I told her everything, starting with the dumping of the Black Beauty; my three jobs, undertaken solely to get me to New York while sacrificing everything else; my isolation from my parents and my lack of friends, my efforts and adventures on the delivery bike and the paper route; my with- drawal from activities at school, my distrust of everyone; my refusal to accept my faults, my dislike of my own appearance and even of my way of speaking; my inability to live tolerably with my parents -- all of it tumbled out of me in stolid, dry detail, as if talking about it under the influence of the wine-induced fog made everything seem galaxies away from Memphis and from me. I was so mildly but pleasantly boozed, I felt as if I were describing someone else. Martha listened calmly and solemnly, asking an occasional question to keep me on track. Just before one o'clock in the morning, I became drowsy and ended my story, settling with a sardonic laugh into a chair across the room from Martha, who smiled sleepily and sympathetically and brushed a stray hair from her forehead. "It seems so far away," I sighed, looking out the window at the roofs of the sleeping city. "I'm so far away from it now, I wonder if it real- ly happened." "Maybe you had to physically get away from it," Martha said, "before you could tell me about it." "No," I said sarcastically, "first you had to get me two thousand miles from home and put a bottle of zinfandel in front of me." She smiled indulgently. "You're not that drunk. Not on zinfandel. But, yes, I did ply you with liquor, hon. I'm sorry. No -- I'm not sorry. I haven't seen this much of you in a very long time." We both yawned. Martha suggested, "Let's get our jammies." We did, Martha slipping into a pair of pale blue pajamas while I donned a thin sweatshirt and jockey shorts, in which I usually slept. But as we were putting away the leftovers, Martha said she wouldn't be able to sleep. "I'll make coffee," she said. I said, "Coffee? At one A.M.?" "Yes," she said frankly. "I wanna talk to you. Do me a favor while I make the coffee: go put your glasses on." "Oh, Martha, I hate those damn--" "Hon, go put your glasses on." I did, reluctantly. In the kitchen she looked me over and decided that it wasn't the fault of the eyeglasses themselves. I protested, refusing to wear them any longer. She made me promise that I'd go with her to a shop where I could replace the cheap plastic frames with some- thing more attractive. She urged me, "Don't passively accept the bad taste others force onto you, Steven. Your face is fine, you just need decent frames." But she wouldn't force me to would wear them publicly until I accepted myself with glasses. While we sat at the dining table sipping French coffee, she took control of the conversation. She said: We grew up without parents. In her case, she had a mother who was willing to be close to her in at least a minimal way, though they had never shared the same values and never would. Martha had at least the memory of a father, whom she described as tall, lean, intelligent, affectionate and independent; he was never very successful, but he was very much a man. He was close to his two daughters and encouraged them to think for themselves. He was killed overseas when Martha was eight. But in my case, she said, things took a different course. Martha saw my mother as a good, conscientious, likeable woman. Martha cautioned me that I should not think my Mom didn't love me; but I should accept the fact that Mom might never be the mother I needed. Nor did I have even the memory of a father, mine having died when I was barely two. In my family circle there were few competent male figures; those that remained were simply worn out, resigned to life as dictated by others. My over- bearing stepdad typified the opposite extreme of heedless masculinity and intolerance. I'd apparently been living in an emotional and intellectual vacuum; I lived surreptitiously, letting others see only those parts of me that I could twist into a mere copy of what they expected. "I hate all of them," I said glumly, agreeing with her. "I distrust and dislike every one of them." "No,!" Martha said forcefully. She pounded the table once with a clenched fist. "No, Steven! Don't hate. Understand. They did what they could. They did what they knew to do. It wasn't much, in my humble opinion, but it was the best they could do. And you do owe them respect. But nobody ever said you had to love them. Anyway, I don't think you can -- I don't think I could love most of the people I was involved with, either, not in the way most people usually do." She said we both grew up as if on a deserted island. We developed our own means of survival, our own ideas, our own view of the world, our own morality. In many ways most children grow up to be like their parents, she said, but in our case we grew up to be more like ourselves, untended, untaught except through our own isolation. "If we feel un- loved," she said, "it's not because we weren't loved. It's because we weren't loved for who we are." The night wore on with neither of us able to stop talking. The subject eventually moved to the unique relationship between us. "It just happened," Martha said, lighting another cigarette and hugging her knees to her chest, her feet propped on her chair seat. "It's so strange, how it happened. Neither of us had the slightest idea what we were doing. We couldn't trust what others told us, because we'd already learned something different. What they told us made sense only in their lives, not ours. It just happened that way." She knocked the ashes off her cigarette and asked me, "Were you ever afraid you'd die and go to hell?" I inhaled and blew out with a bitter huff. "There is no hell," I said. I told her I'd never felt that we were wrong; it was everyone else who was wrong. "I was always afraid," she said, looking down as if remembering. "Afraid of what?" "I don't know," she said, absently and sadly. She paused. She rubbed her shins and then fiddled with her toenails. "I was afraid of a lot of things. But, then, I tried anyway. I was always afraid I'd never be smart enough to be a teacher. But fearing it, somehow, made me need to do it." "Working on the delivery bike was like that. Physically, I'm not cut out for it. The other guys have an easier time of it. I came to that job and the first thing I learned was that I couldn't do it. All it did was make me want it." She made a wry little smile. "You don't belong there. You belong in the theater. You belong in creating and in doing. I wish you didn't want so much to be like everyone else. You're not like everyone else, Steven. You can't be and you shouldn't be. You can't be someone else and neither can I, despite how others might demand it and regardless of how much we might want it." She crushed her cigarette. "That's Ronnie's problem. She wants to be me, she wants the same boyfriends others have, she wants to be anyone but herself. I can't be what my mother wanted, and won't be what Mr. Buchanan wanted. I'm not submissive, and I'm not a saint. I'm stubborn and different. I learned to be alone and to see what others do without being involved in what they do. Maybe that's why I could stay friendly with your mother, without feeling guilty about her ignorance of us. I'm different and rebellious and wicked and I can't help it. I suppose you and I could attempt to do and be what others want -- we might even be good at it. But we'd suffocate." We both yawned, stretching in our chairs and moaning about how late it was. We saw through her living room window that the sky had begun to brighten. Birds chirped outside. I yawned again. "I hope I can get to sleep." "After all this? What would keep you awake?" I thought about it; I was tired, but tense and impatient. "Thinking about all the things we talked about. Worrying, I guess. Wanting it to change, or...wishing it were different." "You can't change what's happened, hon." I yawned again. "No. I guess not." "You're at a disadvantage, not knowing what a father is. I don't know myself what it means to have one, in the way most people do. But I am a teacher, and I did learn things that helped me. I don't know what I can be to you. I certainly can't replace the people you had in your life. But I can teach you...if you promise me something." I rubbed my swollen eyes. "Another promise? Okay. What's the deal?" "Promise that you'll accept the fact that you're not stupid, you're not ugly, you're not incompetent. It's just that -- and don't take this the wrong way, hon -- it's just that you have things to learn. Promise you won't just beat yourself over the head for what you can't be." "Easy for you to say," I told her drily, and reached up to scratch a pimple under my chin. Martha gently pulled my hand away from my face. "Don't, hon. Don't do that to your face." "But it itches," I complained, scratching again. "No!" Again she took my hand, this time holding it firmly and close to her. "Listen to me. If you don't like the way you look, do some- thing about it. I'm going to show you how. This morning I'm sending you to someone at my health club. He might strike you as very eccentric, but I want you to listen to what he has to say. Learn from him. His name is Fiore. He's trains athletes and dancers. Promise you'll listen?" "Oh, okay," I said petulantly. "Don't say okay unless you mean it." "Okay," I said, halfheartedly. "You think I have a nineteen inch waist because I mailed in enough box tops? Fiore showed me how, and I want him to show you how to get rid of those damn things by the end of this week. Promise me you'll listen to him." "Okay." "And work hard." "Okay, okay, promise." "Don't pout, Steven." "What's the sense of it? Seems like such a hopeless case." "Jeez, where in the world did you latch onto such a low opinion of yourself?" "I just...learned to face facts, that's all. I'm not pretty, I'm not anybody. I'm not very smart, I'm clumsy, I sink into a hole in the ground when I'm around people, and I -- " "Oh, hon!" she said, her voice heavy with anger and disappointment. She gripped my hand tightly, frowned at me, and then dropped my hand onto the table. "Steven, what's happened to you?". Groaning with frustra- tion, she rose from her chair and walked to the living room window, sighing distressfully three or four times. She leaned against the window frame, folding her arms and gazing outside. "I'm sorry..." I began. "Please...be quiet while I get this together." "I didn't mean to make you--" "Stop, Steven. I won't let you trick me into feeling sorry for you. And I won't let you feel sorry for yourself, either. It won't get you anywhere and you need more than that. Please be quiet a minute." I waited as she gazed out the window, her arms folded tightly as she shifted her feet and frowned thoughtfully for a few moments. Finally, after a deep sigh, she began: "Hon, I have to tell you something. I wanted to tell you this so many times, but I never knew how. I still don't know how. That last day we were together in Memphis, when we went to the Holiday Inn...just be- fore it was time to leave...I wanted so badly to tell you, it hurt. It physically hurt. But I didn't know how you'd take it. I didn't know how I could possibly make you understand. I once told you that there was some momentous secret I wanted to share with you, and I wanted so much to tell you then. But I couldn't. And I tried to tell you the day my mother was married, and I tried to tell you the day I left Memphis. And there were so many other times I tried. But I was so afraid you wouldn't understand." She stopped and then breathed heavily, wincing with consternation. "If it's so hard to do," I said softly, "then forget about it." "No! Dammit." She rubbed her forehead and gazed out the window. "You need to know this. It's one thing to think no one loves you. but it's another to think you're not lovable. I used to think that way. I know how it feels. I work every day with young people who know that feeling all too well." "Martha, I've heard all this from the Brothers and the -- " "No you haven't, Steven, and stop thinking you've guessed what I'm going to say. Please, just stop thinking and just...listen. This is hard enough for me to say as it is." I opened my mouth to say okay again, but thought better of it. She hugged herself tightly, her hands clinching and unclinching. Thinking she might feel less pressured if I didn't have my eyes on her, I turned away from her in my chair and sat still. After another pause she said quietly and earnestly, speaking into the warm dark outside the window, "I love you, Steven...I've always loved you. From the first time I saw you, barely waist-high to me, I loved you. You were the sweetest, most unique, most open and loving person I'd ever seen. Your eyes had such a beautiful light...so eager, so trusting and so...so very brave. I fell in love with you, and you were so free and giving that...I simply couldn't resist. I never could. I still can't." She blinked. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, and then folded her arms again and gazed out the window. "I don't know what kind of love it is...It's not a romantic, Hollywood kind of love, it's not like married love, it's not motherly. Or maybe it's all of those. Maybe it's what philosophers refer to simply as love, the kind you can't define by any known standard, the kind you can't put in a box. Whenever I tried to control my feelings for you or rationalize them away or moralize about what we did over the years, I couldn't. I once went to one of my advisors, to try to describe what I felt, and later I went to a psychologist. But I couldn't even begin to explain it to them, or even to myself. All I heard from them was the same moralizing that I could get from anyone on the street. I don't know what you're going to make of this, or how you explain any of this to yourself, or even if you know what the hell I'm talking about. I don't even know how to describe what happens to me when we're together or why I sometimes feel so primitive, so free, so wonderfully...alive with the pleasure that, for some reason, I know only with you. I tried to justify my actions, but I can't. I tried to condemn them, and I can't do that either. I tried to make plans around it, tried to resist it, tried to analyze it. I can't. It's just there. It's just...just me-with-you, and I can't conceive of it or experience it in any other way." Again, she sighed and searched for words. "It's just me...and it's just you. It's what you do and it's who you are and it's how you think. I don't think about you all day every day. I don't seem to pine when you're away, not the way I'd miss a boyfriend or a parent. But when I see you in front of me I become a completely different woman...or maybe, I think, I become a secret 'Me' that I can't define or describe. Please understand, hon -- I have no idea what's going to happen to us. Every time I try to control it, it's a little like trying to tell the universe how to change shape. Sometimes I think you'll find someone, and I'd be so happy for you if that happened. I have no desire to own you. I know you'll change with time, and I have no idea what you'll think of me years from now. And I dread...Steven, I dread the day when either of us changes or goes away or moves on with our lives, and I know both of us will. There's nothing that you or I can do to stop that." Her voice cracked a little, and she paused to wipe a tear from one eye. "And, oh, hon -- if I ever did anything to break your heart, I don't know what...I really don't know what I'd do." Still gazing out the window, she collected herself quickly and went on. "Maybe you're getting some kind of ambivalent message from me. Am I wrong to feel the way I do? Were we wrong to break the rules? Am I expecting something from you I have no right to expect? I've learned so much since I left Memphis. I've seen so much. I've...changed so much. I agonized over whether or not to bring you here and see what I'd become, what I'm becoming. But I do trust you. I've always trusted you, because I believe in what we feel for each other. I see honesty and caring in the way you treat me and in every action you took with me. I could see it and I could feel it." She shook her head, slowly and sadly. "We were both so innocent, Steven. Innocent, until we come face to face with the other morality that's out there. Their morality. My sister casually slept with men whenever she felt like it. So many, she doesn't remember their names. Not because they wanted her. Because they liked her. And she was so likeable, she fit in so well, so easily. I didn't have that. I had to work and keep trying to change myself. But men didn't like me -- they wanted me. They thought wanting was morality enough. But not you, Stephen. Your touch and your eyes had love in them. You looked into me, not at me. My father had that about him, too. I wanted him very much, my father. I wanted him sexually, too. I don't know that he ever knew what I was thinking. But when he looked at me, and talked to me, and hugged me...oh, I loved him so! He loved me, too, just...just me. He never made me be someone else or be like someone else; he just wanted me to be the best me I could. And it made me want him completely. I never wanted to own or possess him, and I never wanted him to own me. But I did want to have the whole experience of him. And then let him go his way, let him be him. I feel that way about you. Can it go beyond that? Should we cut our wrists and mix blood? What can we do, how can we show someone how much we love, and how we love, how much we want to totally please, without owning? How do we even marry, without owning? Steven, do you know that when I talked to your mother a few years ago, she told me she was shocked to learn that your Aunt Yvonne regularly slept nude with her husband? Your mother was so incensed, so scandalized. She said, 'God knows, I've never let either of my husbands see *me* with nothing on at all'. She's a good, suffering woman, Steven...but how can people live that way? What kind of morality is that? Mr. Buchanan waits until he's worn out with so many women, women he called whores, and then decides to marry my submissive mother so he can settle down and be waited on hand and foot, with a few of his old whores hanging around in the corners. What kind of morality is that? So many wives faking orgasms, getting pregnant so they can say they're respectable with a home in the suburbs and a new Chevrolet every two years. But without love, without joy, what kind of respectability is that? We pray to God to keep our stocks going up, to help us make more cars and more toasters and bigger bombs. We pray for our team to win the World Series. But no one prays that we'll learn how to love, how to please, how to understand and accept. Hmp. Morality. It's so strange, my talking to your mother and asking your folks to let you visit, let you come here and see the city and the art and new life, new people, new ideas -- life and ideas that they don't really want you to see. Such a pretense I've had to make, so many omissions and white lies, to match up with their morality. My mother's morality, my teacher's, my supervisor's. How could their moral- ity conceive of the...the joy and fulfilment I felt as a young woman the first time I shared myself with you? Their morality forbids it. Their morality forbids neglect, forbids abuse -- and yet we are neglected, we are abused. And what kind of honesty is this, having to be honest behind everyone's back? What kind of morality is it that forbids pleasure, forbids intimacy, forbids ecstasy? Forbids individuation and knowledge and self-realization? It's not *my* morality. It's not my battered wives or my screw-up kids or my frigid women or my impotent men. Not my Mississippi lynch mobs or my wars. My morality tells me I shouldn't lie to them; their morality demands that I do, if I'm to be honest about myself." She bowed her head and sighed. Her voice lowered. "But I can't lie to you, Steven. I don't know if...Hon, I don't know what you expect of me. I have an idea what it is. And I don't know if I can fulfill your every dream. I don't know that you can fulfill mine, either. I don't know that anyone, anywhere, can fulfill everyone's dreams and needs all the time, in every way." She shook her head. "I knew...I knew that one day I'd go to hell for this. And there is a hell, Stephen. It's all around us. Whatever we do or don't do, whether we're right or wrong... we're damned if we do and we're damn if we don't. I can tolerate it. I can tolerate knowing that I do what I think and feel is best. I can tolerate it because even though I don't know if I can do everything for you, I will always, always be as good to you as I can. And I'll always trust that you'll do your best. So if I can't live up to it all, or if you can't, I can accept it. I can live with that much hell." She stopped. She raised her head and breathed deeply from the night breeze that faintly rustled the window curtain. "Oh, hon. I hope I'm not letting you down." She sighed again. She straightened, her voice changing from plaintive to bold. "But there's one thing I simply will not accept. I won't accept thinking that I might have done something, said something, that makes you feel unlovable. Something has made you feel that you can't depend on yourself or your ideas or your efforts. If you feel that way, then I've failed you. Right now, right this minute, I don't really know what to do about it. But I have nine days to change the way you feel about yourself. And I intend to try. No. I don't intend to -- I will." For the first time since she had moved to the window, she turned to look me straight in the eye. "You have no idea how difficult it was to say this. I agonized over it for years. Please don't use it against me, Steven. I think you're old enough to understand what I mean." ==================================== THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE by S.J.R. ============ PART 10C -30- -- +--------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `------------+ | story-submit@qz.little-neck.ny.us | story-admin@qz.little-neck.ny.us |