The Schoolteacher

Maude Merryweather was up reading late… much as she had done every night since childhood. For a vast majority of her 28 years existing, people had sneered at her tousled brown curls and the heavy bags behind her round glasses and wondered: Just how could someone so dull be so tired all the time?! Even the children she taught, barely toilet-trained and talking… seemed more alert and prepared for each morning’s classes. If she hadn’t been so infuriatingly bright and kindhearted… the schoolmaster would almost certainly have found some excuse to be rid of her by now.

Maude was aware of all this. Aware of how people took note of her shy, awkward demeanour and anti-social life-choices. ‘A maid or widow born’ they might whisper behind her back, when feeling a little cruel and frustrated that the advances of yet another eligible bachelor they’d tried to throw at her had whizzed right over her frizzled bun. Yet, respectfully, Maude herself had always found everything they represented frightfully dull as well: unhappy marriages to the boy down the lane, perpetual circular gossip, fish on Fridays then church on Sundays… At least her students still had some imagination left, before it was beaten out of them with a slipper.

Still… lying in her long nightdress, listening to the rain beat against her window. Reading about some idiotically romantic heroine or other bumbling about in the jungle as her clothes got increasingly torn. All her life Maude had felt like she was just waiting for something, someone… to burst in and give the world a bit of colour. To rescue her from her own small comforts and aversion to stupid ideas. Being sensible had become such a chain.

The clatter at the window when thinking such thoughts should perhaps not have come as such of a shock. But Maude had so resigned herself to a life of common drudgery already that she near leapt out of her own skin. It took several minutes of recovery before she managed to clamber her way out of bed… but pure and simple curiosity demanded she go and investigate. Very little could be seen in the murky darkness outside, besides the torrent pouring itself down the window pane. Yet something compelled the young woman to flick open the window latch… and, as soon as she did, those panes were flung inwards with a blast of wind and water.

Maude was knocked backwards, in an inelegant return to her bed. Her legs dangling off the side and flurry of dampness already spreading into her single item of clothing. Something… Someone, was now on top of her. The spluttering light of her reading lamp revealing a bedraggled mass of jet-black hair and altogether too much exposed, wet skin. The pinned-down school teacher could feel every curve of the stranger’s definitively feminine form, soaking into her own clothing and sheets.

“Hi.” Said the soggy phantom, in altogether far too casual a tone for the circumstances. Then proceeded to immediately envelope Maude in a deep and passionate kiss. There wasn’t a hint of apology for barging in naked to someone else’s bedroom at close to midnight; just an immediate infusion of tongue into the very depths of the hostess’s throat.

The beleaguered schoolteacher didn’t know what to do. Nothing at all in her life up till now had prepared her for this. If it was a dream… it was a convincingly cold and damp one! Yet the way the mysterious woman’s body writhed against hers. The strong, wiry arms that pressed her down into the mattress and yet tenderly cupped her face. The rain-kissed taste of her tongue and the warmth of her body despite all the wind and wetness. All of it spoke very much to an ongoing series of phantasms that had plagued her ever since her teenage self had first picked up one of those books with an idiotic heroine in rather torn clothing. So suddenly… against all sense and wisdom… She seemed to find herself returning that kiss with almost as much eagerness as it was delivered in.