Ruth Porges heard the scream and stopped typing. She sat very still, her hands tightening into fists. After a moment she swayed a little, but she made no attempt to rise. The old fear of facing anything even possibly harsh kept her glued to her chair.
It was a fact, a hard fact, that most men found Ruth Porges difficult and cold and thought of her as unemotional. But she wasn't that way now and hadn't ever been and never could be that way.
It was a lie, a falsification which she had never quite known how to refute. She had seen Lathrup refute it for herself when she was not in one of her moods, when she wanted a man to grab hold of her and bring his lips down hard on hers.
How often Ruth Porges wanted that too—and more. How often she'd wished herself dead, not having that, being forced to pretend that it wasn't important, to lie to herself about it and go on, day after day, living a lie. To go on knowing how men felt about her, and how horrible it was that they should feel that way, and how deeply, sincerely, terribly she wanted them not to look upon her as a reluctant virgin with ice in her veins.
She wasn't, she wasn't, she didn't want to be. Why couldn't they see that and understand? Why couldn't they see that she was a woman with a great wealth of understanding to offer a man, a woman with the blood warm in her veins, a woman who could free herself to....
A wave of bitterness, or returning rage almost impossible to control, searing, destructive, hardly to be endured, swept over her and she buried her face in her hands.
If only Lathrup hadn't—
Roger Bendiner. The only man who'd refused to be angered by her shyness, by her panic when the moment actually came and she knew that there was no escape and she'd have to—
Let him undress her. Yes ... yes. She could let herself remember it now, she could begin to bring it out into the open, with no fear of being laughed at and misunderstood. His rough hands on her shoulders and that look in his eyes....
It was like a night of lightning and thunder and you fled into the dark woods and you fled and were overtaken and stuck down.