"Can't catch me!" Leslie said. Her being sixteen to his twenty-eight was bad enough; these occasional regressions into childhood always brought Rick a frisson of guilt. He chased her across his snow-covered fields, though, and caught her easily enough.

It was a Saturday of freedom. They got only a scant hour on weekdays, between his getting home from the machine shop and Leslie going home for supper. Time too short for more than kissing and petting. On Saturdays he got out at eleven. They could play and talk -- and plan. Time to waste, but time that they could waste together.

Their kisses were interrupted by her laughter and his need to breathe. She wrestled playfully until he had his arms around her and her tight butt squashed against his leg.

"Can too catch you," Rick said. "You're mine now."

"Yes, Rick, all yours. Hold me, make me yours, and I'll never run away from you again."

"No, sweetheart. The chase is half the fun. And, for moving four months too soon, the state would put me in prison for much more than four years. If you are to be mine and I am to be yours on any more than a spiritual plane, we have to wait until you are seventeen."

"But only that long," she said. "Tell me we'll be together then."

"We'll be together then, and in between times, as well. Just not as together as we would like. You can keep fleeing me; I can keep chasing you. But you can be chased only so long as you remain chaste."

"Pthlibit!"

"I don't hide my faults from you, sweetheart," he said. "I'm an inveterate punster."

"With a show-off vocabulary." She turned to stick her tongue out at him. He kissed it, and their kiss was long and deep. "But I like your talk. Since I can't have anything else for four long months, tell me a story."

He turned her so that he could kiss the back of her ear before straightening and slipping his hand under her down jacket to hold her breast. "A story the lady wants," he said over the top of her head. "A story the lady shall have."

We might anticipate the time after your seventeenth birthday. But the time in between won't have been wasted from my perspective. I'll have talked with Leslie and held her close.

I'll have kissed her in ways and places that I haven't done yet. I'll have seen her in this field and in my yard. I'll have shown her the new foal. Daffodil will have her foal well before May, perhaps this month.

And as Leslie is a great friend of Daffodil's who has ridden her many times and petted her previous foals, a new foal of Daffodil's will have been one more reason for Leslie to visit. And we will have had many reasons to spend time in the barn.

Maybe, just perhaps, Leslie and I will have watched Daffodil's foal from the hayloft. Nobody will have been able to interrupt us when we are up there without making a huge clatter first. In the hayloft, she won't have been able to hide from my kisses and my hugs. Or we might have decided to watch from an upstairs window. There, Leslie will have been able to undress without freezing. And I'll have been privileged to see all of her beauty at one time. Naked in the cold weather, Leslie won't have been able to flee from the house.

And I'll have hugged my love, and seen my love. And my desire for Leslie will have grown. And something else will have grown, too -- not permanently, but repeatedly. And I'll have kissed my dearest, kissed her mouth to mouth, and felt the electric sweetness of her tongue; I'll have kissed her ears and have felt her wiggle her hips so cutely against my hardness in her attempts to escape, that I'll have wanted -- wanted desperately -- to drive my hardness into that wiggle. But I won't have done so. I'll merely have added that desire to so many others, waiting the right time.

And that will have taken us only into the last, lingering, death of winter, not the birth of spring.

She squirmed around in his arms to kiss him. They hugged until he turned his back to adjust his stiffness within his trousers. He held her with her back to his front again, and blew across her hair.

"Somehow," she said, "I suspect that you have something planned for the spring."

"In the spring," he said. "The mares will come into heat. Now Daffodil will have a well-deserved rest next year, but I plan to breed Delilah ... and Dafney."

"Is she old enough?"

"She's a mare, sweetheart. She is old enough, or will be by then. Horses grow up fast. Remember when she was a baby foal. You came over to see her, and it was the first time that we really talked."

"You thought I was a baby, too."

"You were a delightful child, hardly a baby, and a beauty even then. But you didn't have these." He took a few minutes to reach back under her jacket to play with her breasts through shirt and bra. "I am going to show you so much in the next four months. Anyway, my Leslie wanted a story."

My Leslie is pure quicksilver. I'll chase her again and again; I'll catch her again and again; I'll hold her like this again and again. But however tight I'll hold her, I'll never completely possess her. So I'll need a new bait to trap her, a new bait every time she flees. Maybe a new caress when I run her down, maybe a new place to kiss her, maybe a new sight out in my barnyard.

So I'll show her so many things. I'll show her what the books say about women like herself and men like me. I'll show her how the animals handle passions like ours. For we are animals, too, but animals with a stronger will. We can anticipate the future; we can hold ourselves back, hard as I find it, to make the future last.

But I'll show my love the ways of the animals. I'll bring in a stallion some Saturday when Delilah is ready. She'll flee, but want to be caught. We'll see the stallion pursue her. Then I'll hold my love while we watch the stallion mount her, and cover her, and thrust into her. I'll tell my love, while we watch and I caress her here and here, that this is the way of the male.

For I am male and my love is female. And the stallion's thrust will hold the promise of my thrust. And Delilah's acceptance will be the paradigm I will show my love. I will say that she should be prepared to accept my thrust in the same way. And after I have shown her that, I will pursue her until she must show me something else. I will, for only the second time, see the membrane which guards her entry. Which will still be the membrane which guards our future.

With any luck whatsoever, Dafney will come late to heat as she did last year. If not, she will come back in heat in April. And before Dafney comes into her April heat, I will show my love that Dafney has a membrane quite like Leslie's. If Delilah will be an exemplar to Leslie as to behavior, Dafney will be a representation as to her state.

When Dafney is in full heat, I will show my love something different from an experienced mare's flirtatious running to invite her mate's pursuit. I'll show her the serious maiden flight of a new mare from the stallion who holds more fear than hope for her. But there is only so much room in the corral, after all, and that stallion will desire the pleasures which he has previously experienced much more than Dafney will fear the totally unknown. He'll end her flight. He'll corner her. He'll nip her flank, and -- never having tolerated that before -- she'll stand still while he does. I'll hold my love while Dafney quivers. Then the stallion will rise up and mount her, while her quiverings double at the startling weight.

I'll watch that mounting and imagine my own, which will be much closer in time by then. I'll think of the girl in my arms, and picture her in my arms again but without the impediments. I'll see the thrust of the stallion and let it suggest my own. I'll harden and press that hardness against my love only a few inches from where that hardness belongs.

And I'll remind my love that Dafney stands where she will soon lie and tell her that her flight will avail no more than Dafney's. And I will hug my love so tight in my arms while the stallion thrusts home. And I will let that prefigure my thrust, nearer and nearer in our future.

And we will watch as the stallion's thrust breaks through Dafney's membrane. I will hold my love as she sees a mare being filled by a stallion which is indifferent to the mare's wishes. We will watch the mare's fear and uncertainty tremble under his weight, and certainty, and lust. And I will wonder how much fear and uncertainty my love has, whatever her protestations; but I will look forward to the time that I approach my love with certainty, and an overpowering lust, and even weight. But I will restrain that lust while we watch the horses as tightly as I restrain the body of my beloved. I will hold her tight from the time of the loosing of the stallion until the mating of the beasts is quite done.

When the horses are done, fully done, I will show my love that Dafney is now completely open; but I'll show her very carefully, since Dafney will not be in a mood to be touched back there.

And, when Leslie has seen all that, I'll take her back to the house. There, flee as she might wish too, I'll catch her and strip her. I'll touch her membrane, the membrane which protects her inwardness and our liberty.

Then, and only then, I'll stroke her for the first time where she has admitted that she strokes herself. And I will pursue her response to those strokes until I'm quite satisfied that I have caught something which is as quicksilver and precious as the girl herself. I will hold her and stroke her, and I won't let her go until I'm convinced that I have found her deepest secret and evoked her most fierce response.

He pulled her hood back to kiss the side of her neck, not sucking hard enough to leave evidence. Licking, however, was safe. Teased by his tongue, she writhed in his embrace. He abruptly let her go when he saw a car he didn't recognize pull into the drive a quarter mile away. "Go to the barn," he said. Officially, she was visiting the horses, not visiting him. Before she got there, the car had backed out and gone off the other way.

He could run her down when he needed to, but age often walks when youth runs. By the time he reached the barn, she was currying Daphne. The mare didn't need it, but she always seemed to enjoy it. "Look how large she's grown," he said. Leslie, though nearly 16 hands tall herself, had to stretch to reach the back of the Morgan who was two hands shorter. Of course, Lelie's height wasn't measured at her shoulder.

"But she's still so young."

"Yep. But old enough by any horse-breeder's standards. She came into heat last year, as you well know. Do you think the age rules are too lenient?"

Leslie might enjoy being trapped in his arms. She clearly wasn't about to walk into that trap, though. She wouldn't have been the quicksilver mind he loved if she had.

"On my seventeenth birthday, though, you'll give me the gift that I want?"

"Not quite on your birthday, dearest," he said, "but for your birthday. There are a few preparations you will have done before our celebration. But, as you are in charge of those preparations, you will control the timeline after your birthday. Before you come to visit me on that special day, you will have done a lot by yourself."

In the month before your birthday, you will have practiced teasing yourself every night, playing with your lovely nipples and your magic button. You will have learned to hold yourself at the edge until the anticipation has grown to pain. You will have selected a fine-looking brassiere and pair of panties, both white, and put them in the bottom of your underwear drawer wrapped around a floral sachet. You will have made an appointment with a gynecologist, preferably Dr. Jameson.

You will have seen her as soon after your birthday as possible. You will have asked to have a quite thorough examination, including the state of your hymen. You will have learned from her what methods she would recommend to stretch that precious membrane so that your first intercourse would not hurt. And you will have followed that advice, especially if she will have offered to cut it for you.

Whether it is cut or stretched, you will have allowed days for the soreness to dissipate. You will have warned me on Friday, and prepared yourself that night.

In that preparation, you will have teased yourself unmercifully in bed that evening, playing with your nipples pretending that it is my hands on you. You will have continued that play with both hands above your waist until your breasts are too sensitive for even your touch. Then you will have stroked and tickled your thighs until your newly-opened tunnel is running. You will have put a finger within that tunnel, pretending that it is my finger. (Which requires a good imagination, considering the difference in size, oh well.)

You will have stretched yourself until a second, and then a third finger fits. You will have pretended that the three fingers are my organ invading you. You will have moved them in and out of your tunnel in imitation and anticipation of my strokes within you. When you have played these games for no less than ninety minutes, you will have taken yourself to the only peak of the evening. You will have tried to make that climax as intense and long-lasting as you are able to produce for yourself. Then you will have gone to sleep.

The next morning, you will have taken a tub bath, not a shower. It will have been as hot as you could stand it in that weather and flavored with bath salts. In the bath, you will have stretched yourself again, and brought yourself to the edge of ecstasy. But you'll have risen from the bath still excited, not sated. You will have pampered yourself with warm towels and dressed in the scented underwear. You will have put a good dress over the underwear. You'll have dressed for the weather and walked out to the road a little after eleven.

Once on the road, however, you'll have run to my house, fleeing your home and your girlhood as rapidly as you fled me in the field just now. And much more decisively. And you'll have arrived at my doorstep panting and breathless and overheated.

And the warmth and the exertion will have surrounded you with the aroma clinging to you from the bath salts, and clinging to your underwear from the sachet. Most of the aroma surrounding you, however, will have been generated by your exertion and your excitement. The aroma of an aroused Leslie.

Dafney whickered and nudged Leslie with her nose. Leslie was standing there with the currycomb in her hand, but she was watching Rick and totally ignoring the young Morgan. When Leslie didn't respond, Dafney let a couple of horseturds drop and drank from the bucket in front of her stall.

Leslie let herself out of the stall and latched the gate. "You didn't get to the good part," she said. She opened her jacket to hug him, and she gave him a wet kiss. When he straightened, he could feel her hard nipples press into his belly through her bra and shirt; his erection strained upwards towards the valley between her breasts. She pressed her soft belly against it.

"I thought the parts so far were good."

"Then the best part," she said. "The part where you get to use this." She rolled against him from side to side, rubbing across his arousal.

"Because," she continued, all this preparation has a purpose..."

When I get there, you'll open the door, and invite me in. You'll take my raincoat and smell all that floral stuff as I loosen it. Maybe you will be able to smell my excitement. And it will excite you, imperturbable Rick will finally want something, too.

But, wanting it and getting it is not the same thing, as you have taught me so well. While you hang her coat up, your little Leslie will catch her breath. And brute speed isn't enough inside a house; agility counts, too.

So, you will want little Leslie in her Sunday dress, little Leslie looking so innocent. But you'll have to catch her to have her. Leslie will slip away from you in her slip while you hang that dress up. And, if you think that I look desirable in that dress, wait until you see the slip that comes with it.

Looking chaste while I'm chased... (It's your own fault.) Looking chaste while she's chased, your Leslie will slip away in her white slip. It is white and innocent and girlish, but being girlish it wasn't designed to hide the hips and breasts that Leslie has developed since that slip was purchased. So, if you try hard enough, you will catch me in that slip and buy it for a kiss. But you will need to provide a kiss that is worth that garment.

And you will hang up the slip, over a chair if nowhere else. And your Leslie, not being quite yours yet, will flee again, and hide again. And, not knowing where, you will have to search all the rooms upstairs. Will you find her in a closet? Will you find her hiding behind a door? Will you find her hiding under a bed?

You won't know until you search. And when you find her, if you find her, you will get to remove more garments; not her bra, not her panties, but her shoes and stockings. For you won't find your little Leslie wearing socks like the little girl you will still think she is. And you won't see her playing tag in her pantyhose, for that is asking for a run. You'll have to take the pantyhose off.

And, when you do that, you'll see those panties you want your little Leslie to wear. Not slinky black for a sexy woman, but virginal white for a little girl. And you can't really expect a little girl to take them off for you, can you? So, while you will see them, while you will be able to smell the sweet flower odor from the sachet -- maybe. And maybe it will be overpowered by another odor by that time, an odor that will spoil your illusion that Leslie is a little girl.

While you will see them, you won't remove them then. After you straighten out the pantyhose, it will be time to search for a girl who has fled again. You'll remember how nice it is that you live in an old farmhouse with so many bedrooms on the second floor. And you'll search in the closets, and you'll search behind the doors, and you'll search under the beds, and -- remembering that she is now barefoot and might get chilled by the floors -- you'll search within the beds.

And when you have found your Leslie, you'll see that she is dressed all in white like an innocent little girl, or, at least, how you think an innocent little girl should dress. And you will realize, a little late, that having your wicked ways with an innocent little girl would be even more wicked. So you will remove that bra, and will see that your Leslie isn't so little anymore, especially in the parts that the bra was hiding. And you will kiss your grown-up love, kiss her until she is satisfied with the kiss. Then you will kiss the parts that you have revealed, the breasts that show her maturity.

And when you have kissed everywhere that you have kissed up until then, your Leslie will flee one last time. You will find her easily though. Because, dressed as she will be, undressed as she will be, the only place to hide will be in a bed; and the only bed for her to hide will be your great big one. There, in the bed, you will kiss her mouth and kiss her breasts. While you are doing that, you'll remove your own clothes. When you are more naked than she, you will let her see you as you have seen her.

You will let her kiss you as you have kissed her. You will feel her kisses on every part of your body. Then you will return those kisses until Leslie is gasping in anticipation. You will remove the white panties which are the next-to-last protection of her virginity, and the last symbol of your weird illusion that she -- who is really old enough to bear a child -- is a child herself.

Then you will kiss the last unkissed place on her body. You will use the skill you claim until Leslie is truly yours, out of her mind with lust.

Then, then finally, you will do your duty. You will drive that precious organ of yours, which Leslie may not even see up until that day, into her. You will open the way in a manner which neither the doctor nor Leslie herself can open it. And you will fill her until she holds all of you in herself.

Then you will drive into her and out of her until she screams from the pleasure. And you will feel a greater pleasure yourself and fill her with your seed. And you will rest in her arms and holding a woman in your arms. The pleasure will make you cry.

When you have rested enough, you will fill her again with your cock, until you fill her again with your seed.

The joy in your heart and loins will be tinged by only one regret. You'll realize that you could have been doing precisely that for the previous six months.

"Do you really think that I'm being selfish?" he asked. "Am I planning what will be a crucial and unrepeatable event in your life to please only myself?"

"We can't repeat it?"

"Silly! You know what I mean. It's our first time, but it's also your first time and not mine. Do I really come off as designing it to please some petty kink of mine?

"Well, you keep treating me as some baby. I keep throwing myself at you, and you keep ducking. You can't be so worried about a silly law; you've broken others in your life."

"And so I have," he admitted, "and so I shall. That's part of the reason. I always tell myself that the reason that I break laws is to show that the law is wrong. When you take that tack, obeying the law becomes morally important. And this law is right."

"It isn't right for me!"

"No. It isn't. But you've seen the sign on the road past the grade school? It tries to slow traffic to 30 miles per hour."

"Yeah." She sounded wary.

"Well, is that the proper speed to guarantee safety when your father is driving? He isn't as good as he was when he raced, but he still has lightning reactions. And is it the proper speed for his Uncle Shelton? I get scared walking beside the road when he's driving past."

"Uncle Shelton doesn't speed."

"No. But he's still an accident waiting to happen. But the speed limit is for both of them. The same thing is true of us. You're mature for your age, and not only the bulges which make you so proud..."

"My age!" she said. "Most girls my age have been sexually mature for years."

"And half of them don't have the intellectual or emotional maturity to handle it. You do, but the law isn't made for Leslie; it's made for girls. And the law in New York State says that a girl's consent isn't valid until she's passed her seventeenth birthday. I don't think that this law is wrong; I'm not about to challenge it publicly. So I don't want to sneak around it. And, quite honestly, I don't want to be caught sneaking around it.

"Anyway, it's not as if our feelings are going to go away. We are mature, and that means that we can control ourselves for four months. And that means that we can reconsider our plans until they satisfy both of us.

"So," he continued, "what is wrong with wearing virginal gear for the last day of your virginity? What is wrong with my thinking that the woman I love is a maiden intended for me, rather than a whore looking for a customer? What is wrong with dressing the part that, in actual fact, comports with your reality?"

"I just want to feel sexy, so I want to look sexy."

"You do look sexy. Even dressed like this, you look sexy. I'm not really under any illusions about the size of your breasts, you know." He turned her in his arms so he could confirm the size with his hands. She pressed back against his hardness while his fingers teased her nipples.

"You know," he continued, "when women past a certain age spend an hour every morning over their makeup, they have a goal in mind. They want to look like they aren't wearing any cosmetics. But they want to look like you do without any makeup, not like they do. Seems to me that girls your age are screaming, 'Look-at-me; I'm wearing makeup.' Not that I would question your decisions about cosmetics for yourself when you go to school events."

"Yeah. Right."

"But the very desire to look grown-up displays an immaturity. Although, as I said, it's a good idea to follow the styles of your peers. This underwear thing, though, is just for the two of us. And I am not obsessing over your youth. I'm not chasing young girls, I'm chasing Leslie. The last time I felt this lustful over a sixteen-year-old was when I was fourteen. And, my dear, evoking lust from a man of twenty-eight is a much greater accomplishment than evoking it from a boy of fourteen."

"Yeah," she said in her most teasing tone. "I should remember that you're over the hill. Maybe I shouldn't plan on repeating sex on our first day. Maybe I should allow you a week to recover."

"Now, sweetheart, I'm old, but I'm not that old yet. Leslie has a lot of time before her lover can only get it up weakly weekly. And before that she'll be experienced enough to know that men and women can satisfy each other even when their needs are on different schedules. Long before that time..."

Instead of standing around a barn frightened of every car that drives past, Leslie will have become accustomed to lying beside Rick in the same bed all night. Her only fears will have been of odd sounds in the night. These old frame farmhouses groan and squeak in ways that the new tract houses don't. She will have found that she could wake Rick to look for intruders, and she will have finally learned to ignore those noises.

She will have learned that lying beside Rick has other comforts as well, while it won't have been half so active a pleasure as lying on top of Rick or even lying under him.

She'll have been held in his arms while they both go to sleep. She'll have lain there while they talk quietly, and while they trade kisses and hugs and gentle petting. Sometimes they will have gone to sleep after that, and sometimes his kisses and caresses will have excited her until she can't stand the tension, and then the tension will have doubled. He'll have led her over the edge again and again.

Sometimes, after that, he will have entered her, and possessed her, and taken her up the mountain again, and followed her explosion with his own. Sometimes, though, a restful cuddle and a quiet sleep will have followed her culmination. So, long before Leslie will have any reason to worry about Rick's lust fading to a once-a-week affair, she'll have learned that Rick desires her pleasure as much as he desires his own. She'll have understood that Rick's desire can incite hers, but needn't circumscribe it.

And she'll have had the opportunity, but never the requirement, to find whether she enjoys Rick's desire when it exceeds her own. Sometimes, at least, she'll have been tempted to play with Rick's erection, taking it into her hand when she didn't want it in her vagina. Curiosity, if nothing else, will have led her to watch while she brings him to tension, and culmination. And then she'll have learned how messy Rick can be when she takes him in hand.

"And what if I want it in my mouth, instead?" she asked. He felt his loins lurch at that question. He suspected that she had intended that reaction.

"That can also be arranged. What you want in the way of eroticism for the two of us will always be able to be arranged. Because we'll be free, and the law won't be able to intrude."

"The law won't, but my parents will."

"All too true," he admitted. "Which is why we'll have to keep a low profile for a while longer. But what threatens us after you turn seventeen is a scandal. I don't want your senior year marred by that; I do want your parents' presence, if not their full enthusiasm, at our wedding."

"And who said that I would marry you?"

"You did, actually. But go ahead and play hard-to-get. I pursued you in the field this noon, and I'll pursue you again and again..."