Chapter 1A: Lauren

If you knew what to look for, it was easy to retrace how Frank Connors synthesized the pheromones and used them to accomplish the seductions. Connors, after all, had been both a physician and a scientist, and, whatever his other failings, his lab records were impeccable. To think of Lauren, Polly, Rachel and Kendra as lab subjects was chilling, even after you knew his methods, but it was the best way to understand the data and piece together his "achievements", both in the lab and in the bedroom.

As a true scientist, Connors had assembled and catalogued the letters from the women just as he did the other data experimental data. A shelf of thick lab binders housed his records of DNA analysis, peptide synthesis and "subject records." The emails were usually not printed out, but sat in the Pheromone Data folder on his hard drive. The letters, the handwritten originals often running several pages, were always found in plastic sleeves which in turn were organized in tabs in the ring binders.

Before meeting any of the women, you already felt that you knew them intimately from the letters. It was the personality of Polly that came through most clearly. Polly's letters were impassioned and immediate, alive in every sense; and, ironically, it was she who died in the crash with Frank. She was the only one of the four that I never met.

Polly Buehrens, the letter writer, made an indelible impression as soon as you laid out the cream colored sheets of fine stationery. You knew that this was a beautiful woman, youthful, intelligent and vibrant. The expensive sheets with dark blue borders and her bold handwriting were not overtly feminine but bespoke an elegant refinement. She wrote to Connors using a fountain pen and blue ink, as she did when sending out invitations and thank you notes as the wife of the university president. Many people on campus, both faculty and research staff, knew her exuberant script, and I never doubted that these specimens in the lab binders were in her own hand. As with the other women, Connors had demanded that Polly write to him, apparently so that he could document his progress with each subject. The notation of dates, times and places was strikingly awkward, not the details he would want in love letters. As part of his "scientific" recordkeeping protocol, I don't find them erotic at all.

January 29, 2003

Frank,

The last ten days have been torture for me. I admit it freely. You see that I am now doing what you demanded, because I want to have you again.

Even as my pen moves across this paper, I think of my desire to hold you and to be with you. To have me write to you in this way is crazy, and you are a fool to demand it of me. I think of myself and my husband Scott. My shame should prevent me from committing these words to paper. You are not married, and you don't know how my husband would be hurt by my infidelity.

For twelve years he and I have been entirely faithful to each other. Certainly I have, and I believe Scott has been as well. I cannot tell you my shame, first in betraying him and then in writing this to satisfy your baseness.

Don't you have the sense to know that my letters threaten your privacy and your position as well? What can these letters ever give you but embarrassment? Do you want to blackmail me by having these letters from me? I assure you there is nothing for you to gain in that regard since I want you too badly to deny you anything. You were a gentleman, or so I thought. Now I know better. I can never escape my disgust at what you are forcing me to do. Don't fool yourself. Don't think I take any pleasure in your fetish of writing about what we've done. I'm simply too weak to refuse.

Two Sundays ago, on January 19, in my private research room at the University Library, I sucked you off. You made me come with your hand. I begged you to fuck me over the chair and you refused. You said you would do it only if I begged you in writing, in a handwritten letter.

I am hungry for you. I am hungry to have your cock inside of me. You can see in these words that I have abandoned all shame. My desire now exceeds even my disgust at you and at my own weakness.

I beg you to tell me when we can be together again and when you will fuck me.

If there is a Hell, I'm sure that it holds a special place for you alone and that you will suffer for humiliating me in my weakness and for hurting my family.

Polly

January 31, 2003

Dear Frank,

Please forgive the bitterness of my last letter. I want you and I will do anything to have you again. Please give me another chance to show you the depth of my desire and submission.

On Sunday, January 19, I begged you to come with me into my private carrel at the University Library because I was dying to make love to you. For weeks, I had thought of touching you and having you touch me. I get wet when we were alone together in the clinic or in my office. I want you. Your face, your hair, your smell, your body, the way you move. Everything. I want everything about you.

It was I who made the first move. I pressed my hand to your crotch and I put your hand on my breast. I asked you to caress my breasts. I begged you to let me take you in my mouth. I begged you to let me unzip you. When you came, I swallowed all of your come, and I wanted you to come again on my face.

After I went down on you, I undid my slacks and put your hand on my mound. I begged you to touch me, and I pressed your hand until you put your fingers inside me. I have never been more wet for a man than I was for you. I begged you to do my clit. You made me come twice with your fingers inside of me.

I told you it was lovely. It was the most lovely feeling and I still want it and hate to have a day go by without having you again. I leaned over the chair and begged you to make love to me. I tried to hold your hands on my ass and make you want to fuck me.

You made me beg to be fucked. You told me that you wanted me to write to you and tell you how good it felt, and to beg you to ML. It was lovely beyond anything I could imagine.

Frank, dear, I am begging you. I want you. I have never felt the way I did when you made me come with your hands. There is no desire that I can conceive as so strong as when I am with you now. Every day that we meet in your office or on the wards or in clinic is pure torture that you will not have me again.

Frank, please, fuck me. Please make love to me. I beg you to let me be with you and to touch you. I will kneel and take you in my mouth just to show my obedience. Please let me have you again. I dream that you will let me be with you for a weekend, or even for a day or a night.

Your dearest Polly

February 3, 2003

My dearest Frank,

You know that I will not refuse anything that you tell me to do any more. Why do you want these letters? Do you not humiliate me enough when we are together?

On Thursday, February 5 at 2pm I will be at the Shelburne Motel waiting for you. I will be wearing only the white cotton shirt that you gave me. I have washed and ironed the shirt myself because I wish to please you. I will kneel in the center of the room until you enter and I will beg you to let me take your cock in my mouth.

Please, let me suck your cock when you come to the hotel. I want to bury my face in your body and to drink you in. To be with you and not ML is more than I can stand. This morning I masturbated in bed thinking of you. I masturbated again in the shower. Please let me be with you. Please make me come in whatever way pleases you.

I beg you not to meet in public as we did today. I want to touch you so badly, even when there are dozens of people around us at the university. I am afraid that I will forget myself and touch you, or reach out to kiss you. Even if I do not touch you, I know that my face and my eyes betray me to all who chance to see us together. A scandal can only hurt you as well. It is better not to put the temptation before me.

I ask you to exercise restraint when I cannot. Shall I make my weakness your sin?

Yours, more than I can express, Polly

February 5, 2003

At home 7pm

My dearest Frank,

This afternoon you came to the room at the hotel. I knelt and waited for you as I said I would. I wore only your shirt. You would not let me suck your cock unless I masturbated for you. I could not do it and you left me there. You told me I would have no satisfaction until I learned to be more compliant.

Please believe that I want to do everything you demand of me. Please believe me that I will try. I can't tell you the shame I feel at some of the things you want. Don't you understand? I am inexperienced sexually. My only experience, aside from a couple of experiments in college, is within my marriage. And my marriage has not been adventurous. I do not regret my time with Scott and a marriage with social responsibilities. Never did I miss the emotions that you have aroused in me.

Please understand, you must go slow with me.

I want you so badly. Please let me be with you again sometime. I want to ML again. I will try to do everything that you tell me to do. If you will only let me touch you.

Please. I beg you. Polly

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Peer reviewed scientific papers on the effects of human pheromones had appeared since the 1980's. Pheromones do work. They caused little stir, however, because the effects, while measurable in a well designed experiment, were negligible in everyday life.

Say you read a paper in one of the journals of endocrinology or sociology. Let's grant that the experiment is well designed - a double blind, placebo controlled study of college age women with a sufficiently large sample to be meaningful. They report a positive result: the male pheromone seems to have "caused" a 75 percent increase in reported kissing/petting/affection behavior initiated by the female subjects while the control group with the placebo had an increase of only 32 percent above the baseline. Similarly, there is a reported 12 percent increase in frequency of coitus. Whoop de do!

This is about as exciting as watching grass grow. Since you can produce a larger effect on most women with a dozen roses, scientific interest in human pheromone findings has been understandably muted. That will change when Connors' discovery becomes known. The power they create is just too strong.

What Connors brought was an insight into the genetics that underlies the neurochemistry. Just as every human being has a unique DNA fingerprint, they produce (and will respond best) to a unique set of pheromones. Although Connor had never worked in endocrinology, he was an international expert at DNA analysis and peptide synthesis. You can see the trail of his discoveries from the DNA analysis that he sent down to Yale, back to the pheromone synthesis work that was done at the Dartmouth labs.

But first, he needed to get blood samples from his "subjects." For years, he had almost no clinical practice as a physician, limiting himself to teaching and research, but that changed at the same time that he started his pheromone lab notebooks. It appears that he started taking clinic at the University Health Services specifically to get those blood samples: every time a cute coed came down with anything more serious than the flu, Connors intercepted the vial and withdrew a smaller sample before it went off to the lab. There were two hundred and thirteen subjects - all women - for whom DNA analysis results appeared in his lab notebooks. Of these, seventy-six subjects had peptide synthesis: that is he tried to synthesize male pheromones that would work on those seventy-six subjects. Sixty-two of the synthesis attempts look like terrible matches with the subjects' DNA under the mass spectograph. For each of these there is a notation of poor or fair in the notebooks, and, notably, there is no evidence of romantic involvement between Connors and any of these women.

These "negative results" were not entirely wasted efforts, however, since he refined his techniques for sample preparation and culture media. His results got dramatically better at the end. Of the last twenty five synthesis attempts, 48% were rated as good or excellent in his notes. Of those twelve, Polly, Kendra, Rachel and Lauren ended up having torrid affairs with the good doctor. These results are significant at the .0001 level using a chi-square analysis; scientifically speaking I know it was not chance that he got them into his bed.

If he had published his data it would have caused quite a stir, and not just among endocrinologists. Polly was the wife of the university president with an established academic reputation in her own field. She taught Comparative Literature down at Middlebury and had headed the French Department for several years. Kendra was three weeks short of her eighteenth birthday when she first succumbed to Connors' chemical seduction and thus a victim of statutory rape here in Vermont. Rachel was one of Connors' students in a graduate biology class and certainly off limits under University policy. Lauren -- married, three children -- was the director of the children's school and day care center on campus, a woman whose reckless extramarital fling would sit poorly with her otherwise wholesome reputation. A skeptic could look at these statistics and still doubt the efficacy of the pheromones. I don't think Connors was the only male on the UVM campus to carry on a dalliance with four women at the same time. Might not his success reflect only his heightened expectations, a kind of placebo effect from his synthesized pheromones? The evidence for each of the women does not support the null hypothesis.

Lauren, for instance, remembers distinctly the day that Dr. Connors appeared at the playground outside the children's school. It was a hot day in June, June 11th to be exact, when she came out to the playground during the first morning play period, and found him leaning on the red slat wooden fence that surrounded the play equipment and the sandboxes. Assuming that he was one of the dad's that she had never met, she came over to introduce herself. She remembers shaking hands with him and thinking he was the sexiest man she had ever laid eyes on.

He explained that he was a doctor over at the medical school. They chatted about the kids and how the school did check ups and vaccinations. She assumed he was a pediatrician. After a few minutes she had invited him in through the gate and they strolled together among the kids and the staff. He was not married and had no children; but he stopped and played with a little girl laughing on the swing set, and he broke up a minor battle between two four year old boys who both wanted the same dump truck.

At the end of half an hour she was in love with his laugh, and she was smitten by the movement of the muscles in his back and thighs when he crouched to speak with the children. She also remembers this as the moment when she became self-conscious about her light summer dress, her bare arms, and way the wind blew the thin gingham fabric into the outline of her slender waist and thighs. She had not felt the same way since college when she had met Chuck, her husband, on a summer day just like this one.

She invited him into her office to look at the way they kept their medical records, aware that she was making conversation just to be with him. When she asked him to come back at closing at six o'clock, she had already crossed the line in her own mind between flirting and... and something else that had no natural boundaries.

He came at exactly six o'clock. She felt her heart beat wildly, loud enough, she thought, for all of her staff to hear as they left for the night. As usual, she would be the last one out and she would lock up. As she gathered the papers on her desk and put them into an organizer, she felt his gaze on her, warming her like the sun at the beach, and she blushed across the open neck of her dress. "So," she asked. "Do you feel like getting a cup of coffee?" She was thinking of where they could go downtown; but when she stood up from her chair she was only inches away from him, and before she could stop herself, she had reached up and kissed him. It was a kiss of surprise and exploration - a kiss of "who-are-you-and-what-am-I-doing?" Her arms moved around him, and she felt herself melting into him. That was the only way she could explain it afterwards. His chest was deeper than she knew, and the curve of his neck more graceful, and his arms were stronger and his touch more electric. His breath was like spring and winter all at once in her mouth.

One half step backwards wedged her against her desk. His thighs pressed into hers. In that single step it seemed that she had flushed and warmed from her waist down. Their tongues swirled against each other. While he held her tightly around the waist, she could still move against him and so she mashed her mound into the strong curve of his thigh. When his hand reached back to hold her ass, she had the rhythm and the pressure she wanted to bring her arousal a notch higher. Press and release. Squeeze and release. A long deep hug from his other arm around her shoulder pressed her breast against him and she felt the engorgement in her nipples. Her loins pressed directly into his bulging hardness, and then the orgasm began to swell inside of her.

She still remembers the look on his face as she began to come - he was more astonished than she was. This wanton woman, this sexual geyser was exploding beneath his hands and in his arms from their first kiss and a few minutes of dry humping. He broke off the kiss while her body shuddered and she was still trying to press herself into him.

She found that he had lifted her up and back a few more inches onto the desk and his hands had already pushed her dress up to her waist. Without any hesitation his hands both gripped the waistband of her underwear and pulled them down, pushing off her sandals before they passed her feet and dropped to the floor. His mouth moved along the insides of her thighs, and she thought she could make out each point of stubble in his "six-o'clock-shadow."

"Oh! Please!" she shouted when his lips brushed lightly the hair of her mound. "Yes! Please, oh God!"

The orgasm that had started when they were pressed together still moved through her womb in waves as his tongue settled into her opening. She felt a gentle sucking that seemed to empty the juice from her pussy and to pull her fleshy inner lips into his mouth. The waves that gripped her subsided for a moment; but then, as she relaxed, his tongue moved again with greater pressure, quickly up one side of her clitoris and down the other, just fast enough to trigger the spasms inside her again.

She looked up into his face as she lay on the desk. Two of his fingers slid into her opening and then four fingers. She felt the fullness of being fucked: his fingers inside and his thumb sliding over her clit with each stroke. By raising and lowering her legs over the edge of the desk, she levered herself back and forth and gave herself a more powerful orgasm, the one she wanted before she could lay still under the caress of his hand. Still she watched his face.

"What do you want to do?" he asked. "I want to see you tomorrow."

"Oh, yes. Yes!" she exclaimed. At this point, she remembered, it was at this point that she first asked him his name.

He took her hands and helped her sit up so that they could kiss again.

"I'm Frank," he said. He took a university business card from his trouser pocket and laid it on her desk. "Please write to me. Tell me what you want to do."

They kissed one more time and she thought another orgasm would grip her, but he stepped away.

"Are you OK to lock up?" he asked.

She nodded and he was gone.

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Connors filed the emails from Lauren in the folder labeled "Qualitative Data" on his hard drive. If there were any experimental subjects before her, you could not tell from his lab notebooks. Nothing in the lab notes indicates explicitly why he chose her to be first. The match between the pheromone synthesis and her DNA sequencing was labeled "excellent" but so were several others that had been completed earlier. We don't know whether he wanted a real challenge for the first chemical seduction or an easy conquest during which he could more easily check his process.

Regardless of Connors' motivation in choosing Lauren, my own decision to go after her was simple and practical. Connors had already spent several months and over $20,000 to successfully synthesize the pheromone that matched her DNA. With page after page of experimental results in the lab binders, I knew that I could not miss with her. Even now as she confides her story to me as her lover, she still has no idea that Connors seduced her with the pheromones, nor that I have "inherited" his formulary.

From the moment I tracked her down from Connors notes, I thought she was cute. Connors and I seem to agree on what makes a woman attractive: I loved her smile and the way her body moved. Her smile and her eyes worked together: She happens to be one of those people whose widely dilated pupils make them so attractive and engaging once you fall within their orbit.

Judging from the emails she wrote to Connor you would not think Lauren Bakersfield was looking for an extramarital affair at that point in her life, but she obviously wanted him badly even from the first day. She protested that she had no intention to ignore her marriage vows, but she might have made this denial just to ease her guilt as what she was doing. We'll never know.

June 11, 2002

Dear Frank,

Today was lovely beyond anything I can describe. I have three young children, Sarah, Charlie, and Gillian, ages 7, 5 and 3. My husband is Chuck and we have been very happy together. How can I write to you about my husband? I feel the rest of my life falling away while you hold me in your arms. But the children need me. They need us, their mother and father both. It will be hard for me to remember that when you touch me again.

You asked me what I want to do. I don't know.

Please come to the school again sometime tomorrow. I will look for you. Can you come again at six when we close up? Write to me. You must tell me what you think of me after today.

Many hugs and warm kisses, Lauren

June 12, 2002 Dear Frank, I have looked for you each time I could go out into the playground this morning. Will you come today? Your Lauren

June 12, 2002 Dear Frank,

I have tried to call you at the number for your office, but I did not want to leave a message with your assistant. Please tell me if you cannot come today. I will wait for you until 630pm but then I will have to go home.

Your Lauren

June 12, 2002 Dear Frank,

I am at home now sitting downstairs at the computer. The children are asleep and Chuck is waiting for me.

I breathe in and I think of you and I remember what it was like for you to hold me. I remember the strength in your arms and the heat of our kisses. Never in my life have I felt these things. I don't know how my body could react in that way, but I want to feel it again. You must write to me about yourself. How long have you been at UVM? Have you ever been married? What brought you down to the playground on Monday?

You did not come and you did not call today. As I type this, I hope every moment that there will be an email from you in my box before I go upstairs to bed with Chuck. Perhaps you do not call because I am married. That's reason enough, I'm sure. Until yesterday I would have said it was reason enough. Today it seems like no reason at all to me.