lover,” she sighed.
“Is it really necessary?” asked Emmanuelle.
But Marie-Anne was apparently in no mood for joking. She shrugged with annoyance. “You’re odd, Emmanuelle,” she said. Then, after a silence, “You don’t intend to go on living like an old maid, do you?” And she repeated, seized with a kind of anger, “You’re odd, really!”
“But I’m not an old maid,” Emmanuelle pleaded timidly, “I have a husband!”
This time Marie-Anne merely answered with a cold look. She seemed to find Emmanuelle’s argument pitiful, and to have no interest in continuing the discussion. But now it was Emmanuelle who did not want to change the subject. She tried to re-create the mood. “Don’t you want to take off your panties?”
Marie-Anne shook her braids. “No, I have to leave.” She stood up. “Are you going to take me home?”
“Why are you in such a hurry?” Emmanuelle complained. But she had already realized that Marie-Anne’s decisions were irrevocable.
In the car, Marie-Anne gave her a look of serious concern and said, “You know, I don’t want you to waste your life, you’re too pretty. It’s stupid for you to be as prudish as you are.”
Emmanuelle laughed loudly. But Marie-Anne did not give her time to make an ironic reply. “It’s incredible that you’ve gotten this old without ever having had anything but those worthless little adventures in your windowless airplane.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re not normal, take my word for it.”
“Marie-Anne . . .”
“Never mind . . . But there’s no use moaning over the past.” Her green eyes glowed. “From now on, will you at least do what I tell you?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Everything I tell you.”
“Well . . .” said Emmanuelle, fascinated.
“Will you give me your word?”
“Oh, all right, if it amuses you.” She continued smiling, but Marie-Anne did not let herself be diverted from her solemnity.
“Shall I give you some advice?”
“No, thanks!”
The elfin eyes analyzed the seriousness of her case. She tried to maintain a casual attitude, without deluding herself about her chances of holding her own against Marie-Anne.
When the car stopped in front of the bank that her father managed, Marie-Anne said, “At exactly midnight tonight, caress yourself again. I’ll be doing the same thing at the same time.”
Emmanuelle blinked her eyes as a sign of complicity. She leaned out the window to throw a kiss to Marie-Anne, who called back to her, “Don’t forget!”
Only after she was gone did Emmanuelle realize that she had not been able to ask her a single question. She had told that little girl with braided hair everything about her private life, but she knew nothing about hers. She had even forgotten to ask if she was a virgin.
That night, when Jean had taken his shower and come into the bedroom, he found Emmanuelle kneeling on the edge of the big, low bed, naked. She put her arms around his hips and took his penis in her mouth. She had sucked it no more than a few seconds when it swelled and stood up. She passed it back and forth between her lips until it was very hard, then she licked it all over, tilting her head, pressing the blue vein that lay just under the skin, making it grow larger and more congested beneath her kiss. Jean told her that she looked as if she were eating an ear of corn and she bit him lightly with her little teeth to complete the analogy. She quickly redeemed herself by drawing the satiny skin of his testicles into her mouth. She lifted them in her hands, slipped the end of her tongue under them, caressed another vein, gorged herself on the warm blood she felt pulsing more strongly at the touch of her lips, explored more and more intimately, searched, moved forward and back, abruptly returned to the end of his penis, pushed it to the bottom of her throat, so deeply that she nearly choked, and there, without withdrawing it, she slowly and irresistibly pumped it