Excerpt of Body of Knowledge by Louisa Crane

CATHERINE CLOSED HER EYES and lay on her back,
envisioning the couple in the picture, not as a black-
and-white engraving, but as real, flesh-and-blood lovers
sharing their bodies in the ultimate act of intimacy. The
image was startlingly real, as if she were watching a
stage play, albeit an extremely bawdy one, from the front
row. She imagined how it would feel to open herself up
like that, physically, to a man, to be made love to, to
experience that kind of pleasure.

Extraordinary pleasure…

Catherine felt the most curious sensation of heat and
swelling between her legs, and dampness, too, although
she wasn’t perspiring elsewhere. She hesitated, then
pressed a hand to the juncture of her thighs, through her
skirt and underpinnings. She rubbed her fingers back and
forth slightly, which both relieved and exacerbated the
feeling, as when one scratched an itch, only to find that
the scratching itself heightened the irritation. She’d
never touched herself like this, though she suspected men
did occasionally, or at least some men. Abbie had once
whispered of walking in on her brother when he was
fondling himself “there.”

A hand stroked her breast.

She jolted upright, every nerve on end. For a split
second, she thought she saw a shadowy form looming over
her in the semidarkness, but the illusion evaporated as
she looked around, heart drumming.

No one was there. Of course no one was there. She was
alone here. What she’d felt, or thought she’d felt, was a
delusion, like the others she’d been experiencing these
past few hours.

She lay back down again, an arm over her face. It isn’t
real, she told herself. It’s a figment of my imagination.
From her reading, she knew that hallucinations could be
brought on by many factors other than those, such as
intoxication or lunacy, which she could discount out of
hand in her particular case. Fatigue, dehydration, and
stress, all of which she’d been suffering from this
afternoon, could make one experience things that weren’t
really happening.

And then there was the magnetic vortex that had, at the
very least, disabled her compass and watch. If it could
affect inanimate objects that way, perhaps it could also
affect the human mind.

She felt a kind of ticklish heat on both breasts through
her shirtwaist and camisole, as of fingertips trailing
over them very, very softly. Her heart raced; her lungs
pumped. Then came a breathless warmth as the hands
caressed her more firmly, but still with a mesmerizing
gentleness.

It isn’t real, she told herself, even as she luxuriated
in the soft friction, her breasts seeming almost to
swell, her nipples tightening into stiff little nubs.
None of this was real. It was her mind fulfilling her
secret wishes, giving her that which she most desired—the
pleasure she must deny herself in reality, but about
which she was wildly curious.

The hands moved downward to her skirt, gathering up the
heavy brown wool and the linen petticoat beneath. She
felt them on her stockinged legs, and then her bare
thighs, which they parted. Feeling starved for breath,
Catherine folded both arms over her face, her eyes
tightly shut, whispering, “This isn’t real. It isn’t
happening.”

There came a little creak of bedropes as the mattress
dipped between her outspread legs, almost as if someone
had lowered himself there. She felt the brushing of
fingers through her linen underdrawers and a little
plucking sensation as one of the buttons securing the
slit in the drawers popped from its buttonhole.

A second button slid free, and a third, and a forth, with
maddening slowness, the fingertips grazing her very
lightly along her most sensitive flesh. When at last the
slit was unbuttoned, she felt the fabric being spread
open, exposing that part of her that even she had never
really seen, never touched except to bathe. The cool air
was a shock on her hotly aroused sex, magnifying her
sense of exposure.