A nocturne filled the air of the music room as Elena sat playing for Jane.
How long she had been listening and watching, Jane didn’t know. She had lost track of the time and was feeling soft and light, a snifter of br andy in her hand, as she lounged in a wing-backed chair.
It had not been difficult to persuade her Wellesley classmate to spend the first week of the winter holidays in her family’s otherwise empty home. Her uncle, aunt and young cousin, Gertie, had all g one to London to stay in the home of Gertie’s fiance. They would be there well into spring when her cousin would be treated to a Parisian shopping trip for her trousseau before returning on an early summer steamer for a June wedding.
Jane was glad to have college as an excuse not to join her family in London. Much as she liked to travel, she disliked always being in debt to her aunt and uncle, who were not even as close relatives as their designations implied. In fact her “aunt” had really been her mother ’ s cousin, before her parents had died of smallpox in the desert of New Mexico where Jane had grown up on her family’s ranch.
Jane had been fifteen when she became dependent on her distant kin. They made it quickly clear that t hey had never approved of her mother’s marriage and did not intend to let her marry so frivolously herself. Of this she was glad, and it made it easier to persuade them to let her attend the new college for women. Though the expense of this was not small, it cost them less in clothes and travel and balls than had her cousin’s engagement, though it had only taken her a season to find a match.
Jane would never marry. Her aunt and uncle probably knew this, but kept it politely to themselves. Jane didn’t care. She had no desire to marry.
What she desired was the girl at the piano before her tonight.
Elena Whitman was a sweet Quaker girl whose own mother had been critical to the foundation of the women’s college. Elena’s plan was to study the law and spend her life fighting battles in the courts for women who had been wronged in some way by the legal and social structure so pitted against them.
But this was only of passing interest to Jane.
Now her glance moved from Elena’s hands, skipping over the keys, to h er feet pressing and lifting the pedals, to the back of her neck, where a tiny strip of flesh peeped between her collar and her low-gathered hair. Jane was overtaken suddenly with a desire to kiss that strip of flesh, and she rose quietly from her chair, p utting her drink on the table beside it and stepping lightly to the piano.
Elena played on as Jane stepped behind her, reached out and drew an index finger gently from her ear to the lace of her collar, then bent and kissed her neck. She kept playing sti ll, as Jane began to draw out the pins that held the girl’s hair in place, slowly combing it through her fingers. At last, Elena sighed, stopped playing and leaned back against Jane, asking, “don’t you like the music?”
“I love the music,” Jane said with a smile, “but the musician is irresistible.” And she turned the piano stool until Elena sat, facing her.
Jane fell to her knees and placed Elena’s hands on her shoulders as she reached to the bottom of the girl’s skirt and then beneath it. Elena leaned down and kissed Jane for a moment, then pulled away with a grin as Jane’s hand moved up her thigh slowly.
“Shouldn’t we go up to bed?” Elena whispered.
“But it’s so far,” Jane pretended to complain.
Elena smiled and stood, shook her skirt and reached ou t to pull Jane from her knees. Jane tried to kiss Elena again, but the girl smiled and grabbed her hand as she ran lightly through the big room, down the hall and up the broad staircase.
A fire burning high in the hearth was the only light in the room as Jane half kissed, half pushed Elena to the bed where she reached under her
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