“Another dance?” he asked, hopefully.
“Okay.”
They danced for another couple of numbers. She felt him stroke her breast, but thinking it was an accident, she ignored it. The third time she realised it was deliberate.
She delved into his mind and found a sexual urge in which she featured as the target for his desires. She tried a little tweak and to her consternation, she found it didn’t work.
The music changed to a ballad, but before she could react, he had grabbed her and pulled her close to him. She felt both his hands on her buttocks and he started to press his groin against her.
She broke away from him.
“What?” he said, his face a picture of innocence.
“Nothing. Thanks for the dance, I need the loo,” she said, and left him standing on the dance floor. She sensed his disappointment and confusion.
This was the first of many encounters. Amber realised that boys saw her as an object of desire first and as another person second. It made her cross. She thought back to that day when the nasty man watched them playing at school. She could only cause the man to freeze, so to speak, but she had no power over his sexual desire or urges.
She’d found her first weakness.
In a way, she was relieved, as it meant she was human after all. Okay, she had special gifts, but she also had limitations. She became determined to ascertain her strengths and weaknesses. She found herself looking forward to returning to Malmsbury Hall.
In the end, Jay found a girl who responded to his advances, so Amber was able to relax, but she now knew how boys viewed her. However, boys were not her only potential predators.
Amber focussed on her mental powers of manipulation on her next session at the Hall. She was disappointed, for she saw little of the gallant Major, whom she now saw as her only real friend.
Matthew had little choice in the matter, as the Brigadier sent him on an attachment to MI6 for a specialist course in covert skills. He wasn’t even back to drive Amber home, or get word to her that he was otherwise occupied. As a result, she felt angry, hurt and confused.
Gabriella Street was a very fit and attractive woman. She had been an Olympic standard athlete and had represented England in the European championships for three years running in the late 1950s. Having graduated from Durham University, she found her niche on the athletics field.
However, having sustained one injury too many to her left Achilles tendon, she retired from the field and took up coaching. Now employed by St. Helens as the head of sports and PE, she took up her new challenge with gusto. The added incentive was her penchant for young, pretty and impressionable girls. For Gabriella was a lesbian, so in the 1960s at a select private school in middle England, it was neither the time nor the place to ‘come out’.
Of a good family herself, the social ramifications of her ‘condition’ were almost overwhelming and stifling. An older girl at Cheltenham Ladies’ College had seduced her at the age of fourteen. The excitement and thrill she experienced at having a seventeen year-old lover was so enormous, that by the time she was seventeen, she had managed to seduce several girls herself.
Added to experiencing sexual abuse from an uncle at the age of ten, Gabriella never looked at a man as a sexual partner, or even as a friend. She had once ‘entertained’ a man whilst in Rome at an athletics championship. The affair was short, sordid and unhappy. She never looked back, now convinced that men had no useful purpose in life.
As the head of sports and PE, she tended to take the older girls and the most advanced games. Thus, she first met Amber as a budding fifteen year old in the colts hockey XI.
Immediately drawn to the tall and slim girl with the hypnotic eyes, Gabriella identified her next potential victim. She encouraged the girl, who was remarkable gifted at the game. Amber seemed to have an uncanny ability to dribble the ball, as if the ball was glued to the stick. Her shooting was remarkable, as so little effort managed to produce an incredibly accurate and very hard shot, inevitably to the back of the opponents’ goal. She also appeared to have the skill of being able to ‘bend’ the ball’s trajectory in the air. And this several decades before David Beckham!
Amber was aware of Gabriella’s intent almost from the outset, but found her slightly more amenable to manipulation than the males. Knowing that the older woman was treading a dangerous course, and that overt action on her part was highly unlikely, Amber simply allowed things to happen.
She was also curious.
She knew about sex. She’d lain awake at night and ‘drifted’ into Jenny’s mind when she’d had sex with her husband. It gave Amber a similar feeling of pleasure, but tinged with the guilt of an eves-dropper, it was not an experience she repeated often.
But sexual relations between two women, this was not in her experience.
She knew that if she let a boy make love to her then she could become pregnant, but another girl – what could she do?
She found the thought of making love to a boy arousing, but tinged with danger. The thought of lying naked with another girl was also appealing, yet without the dangers of pregnancy. The social conscience hit her with unwarranted feelings of guilt.
Nice girls didn’t!
Wasn’t Miss Street a nice girl?
She came from a good home, one of the best schools and represented the country on the athletics field, so what went wrong?
Wrong!
Was it wrong, or just different?
Amber remembered Andrew.
Was she wrong to have chosen a different path to that which she had been born to?
Amber was confused and she disliked the feeling. She also felt uneasy about how she felt about Matthew Rider - her dashing Major. She knew what a schoolgirl crush was, and she managed to channel her thoughts away from him as often as she could. It wasn’t helped by the fact that recently the Major was noticing her physical changes and was responding to her as a man to a woman, and not as an adult to a child.
Boys bothered her. They were silly and unpleasant most of the time. In trying to show how grown up they were, all they achieved was a reinforcement of their inadequacies. Major Rider, on the other hand, wasn’t a boy. He was in his thirties and very much a man. She liked his smile, his laugh and often yearned for his reassuring touch. She often fantasised about having a lover, yet inevitably he turned into Matthew Rider. Having been recently ‘abandoned’ by Matthew, she was still feeling hurt.
Perhaps, if she let Gabriella have what she wanted, then she would lose her crush on the Major.
The opportunity arose after games one wet afternoon.
Amber was picking up her tracksuit top when Miss Street came over to her.
“That was a very good game, well done.”
“Thank you, Miss.”
“I noticed your stick seems to have a split in it, would you like to see if we can do something about it?”
Amber was aware of the woman’s intent, yet was strangely calm about it.
“Oh, like what?”
“I have a special binding tape that will fix it up as good as new. Come up to my flat when you’ve had a shower and we’ll fix it.”
“I have a music lesson straight after. I won’t have time.”
“Then why not come now? Have your shower in my bathroom and I’ll fix the stick as you shower,” the older woman suggested. She was almost breathless with desire as Amber’s pert breasts were tight against her damp top.
Recognising her desire, Amber played to it.
“What about my clothes?”
“Run and get them from the changing room. This won’t take long.”
Amber licked her lips and nodded, well aware that Gabriella was almost shaking with anticipation.
“Alright.”
She ran to the changing room, collected her uniform and towel and ran back to where Miss Street was waiting.
They walked to her flat, which overlooked the field.
“Shower is in there, help yourself to shampoo and stuff,” Gabriella said, pointing to the bathroom. Amber went in and stripped off. She started the shower and washed her hair.