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.