Debra Boxer - The Lesson

"I don't have a pot belly, if that's what you're thinking. You'll have to trust me on that."

"I wouldn't guess that anyway by looking at you." The way you're looking at me now is as if you're looking without the intrusion of clothes. My clitoris seethes. I inhale sharply.

I'm spinning in a heightened state of restive awareness. I suddenly see and feel everything at once. Drunk on my own precision. I am wholly tuned into you. Plugged into a socket of purely carnal thought. Prickly, pleasurable, yet painful, sensations caress my skin like a cat kneading my thighs with its claws.

My legs are squeezed together so tightly, I think they'll meld into one. The clock ticks. So loud I'm afraid you can hear it. What if the alarm was inadvertently set and it goes off in public? Everyone will turn to stare. And here I'll be with oyster juice running down my legs.

Debra Boxeris a writer from New Jersey currently living in Seattle. Her work has appeared in The Best American Erotica 2000, Nerve, Clean Sheets, Moxie, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Daily Record of New Jersey.

"The Lesson," by Debra Boxer, © 2000 by Debra Boxer, first appeared in Clean Sheets (Clean Sheets, 2000), www.cleansheets.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.