Chapter 15: While the Cat’s Away...

Dr. Richards arrived with a familiar face. The girl’s name was Sarah Beiler. She was one of the Amish girls that stayed on after the wedding. The Amish called it Rumspringa, the time away from the community. It was a rite-of-passage, something a social science major like Elspeth well understood. It also made perfect sense. If Dr. Richards was going to rough it at Cloudrest, two is much safer than one.

Sure enough, Monday morning Dr. Richards and Sarah left in the SUV while Johnson took the Infiniti back to New Jersey. Elspeth did her job, prepared for the inevitable questions directed to Dr. Richards, and hunkered down for the storm. It did not even take a day. By six o’clock, Elspeth was ready to swear off business. She set the phone to auto-reply and turned off the computer.

Elspeth’s problem was that she wanted to get back to her fantasy about Kirsten, but the mood was not right. Elspeth could insert the Kegel balls, do exercises to stir them around, visualize how Kirsten looked, what scent she was wearing, how she bit her lip when she was preoccupied. What Elspeth could not manage was getting into the headspace where fondling herself felt like a lover’s touch.

Still, it was an image worth preserving. Sighing in frustration, Elspeth pulled out her laptop and described the scene from the previous day. That led to describing a new scene, taking place right then, in a different apartment. It wasn’t the same as exposing herself in the public laundry, but it was differently stimulating to flesh out a character and build a situation.

Before Elspeth realized it, several hours had gone by. When Mother Nature’s call could no longer be ignored, she set the computer aside and went about her morning routine, even though it was two o’clock in the afternoon. Muesli porridge also works for lunch, if there is enough of it. It was past five when Elspeth reread her work. What had begun with a simple physical description of a fictional lover had grown into 20 pages of gibberish.

Elspeth was an Ivy League PhD. She knew dreck when she reread it. Yet, something stayed her hand as she moved to delete it all. On her third reading, she recognized worthwhile elements. Opening a notebook function, Elspeth started to extract a character and setting from her earlier flow of consciousness writing. Twenty pages quickly boiled down to four pages of notes in outline form. Starting from the supposed meeting in the laundry, Elspeth began to write.

The story came out at 2800 words. It described a chance meeting of two women in an apartment laundry. Told from Kirsten’s point of view, it chronicled the feelings of a straight girl having her first lesbian encounter. At no point did the characters physically touch, but Kirsten ends the story thinking about how a touch might feel.

It was no prize winner, but Elspeth would have been willing to submit it for a grade. Nodding to herself, she opened a new folder and saved the story. The exercise raised a point in Elspeth’s mind. If a fictitious lover was interesting, Dr. Richards must be fascinating. Elspeth started documenting what she knew of Dr. Richards’ childhood and schooling. It was almost one in the morning that she realized she had not eaten since lunch. Eating curried lentils and rice, Elspeth mapped out some research, which would start with the ladies of the clubs.