The water in the shower was warm, and it beat down hard on Jassy's bruised, coal-dust covered flesh. Every tingling drop, as it cascaded off her sore aching body, only served to remind the girl of what seemed to be other, deeper, although invisible wounds. She had washed and washed, but still she felt dirty. Great shudders of rampant self-disgust swept through her, and she felt as though she'd aged ten years since she left the house earlier that day.
How trusting she'd been when Amanda had asked for her help, she remembered, hating herself now for her own foolishness. Each minute had seemed like an hour.
Resentfully, she also remembered Scott and the way he had ordered her about, as though she weren't even a person at all, just an object to satisfy his perverted sexual whims. In fact, now that she was safely at home and at a distance from the lewd acts she had been forced to perform with Amanda and Scott, Jassy found herself remembering that if it hadn't been for Amanda and what she had seen Dirk doing to her in her bedroom last week, there was a good possibility she would never have had to go through this.
But she couldn't really convince herself of that. If nothing else, the rude events of the past few hours had forced the naive blonde to be totally honest with herself. Even though she'd submitted to their lewd seduction, unwillingly at first, her own body soon began to respond to their lustful touches of its own accord, indeed even to crave them. And that was the worst of it. Jassy had never dreamed that there could be any separation between love and fucking. Because Scott had made her feel so good the first time she was alone with him in the mine, she assumed she was in love with him. How could she have been so foolish? How could she have convinced herself, for whatever reasons, that she could ever be happy with a man as different from her as Scott Thorpe? It didn't seem possible. Thorpe had made an utter fool of her, he and Amanda. For the first time it occurred to the young miner's daughter that Amanda had also wronged Dirk Mulligan, and had possibly been as cruel to him as Scott had been to her.
As she turned slowly beneath the stinging spray of water, Jassy tried to think of Dirk as a human being rather than the somewhat stern man who had appointed himself her guardian after her father's death. Instead of seeing him as someone who was just trying to protect her from hurt, as he knew her father would if he were alive, for the first time she saw him as he truly was: a gentle man who had sincerely wanted to help her and was concerned about her. The blonde, in a flash of revelation, suddenly saw herself more clearly as well, a willful and somewhat rude young woman who had taken Dirk's freely offered concern for granted and never, even bothered showing him how much she really did appreciate all the things he did for her.
It was shocking to think of how much trouble she must have caused him. Why, looking after her the way he did, he had really cheated himself out of the kind of wonderful life he deserved, but he hadn't cared, he had stood with her anyway. She would never be able to give up that much for an ass like her. Dirk was truly wonderful.
Jassy began to cry again, only this time it wasn't for herself, it was for Dirk and perhaps for the whole human race of which she suddenly felt herself undeniably a part. She cried until her tears felt a part of the cascading shower water around her, and when the blonde could cry no more, she stepped out of the shower.
Her nakedly shining flesh shivered in the comparative cool of the bathroom after the warm shower, and Jassy reached for a towel to dry herself. The soft, thick terrycloth rubbed against her flushed skin as she looked at herself curiously in the full-length mirror. There were several black and blue marks on her arms and thighs, and her blue eyes looked overly large with fatigue. Her long blonde hair hung wetly to her cheeks and the tops of her shoulders as she carefully examined herself. She looked for all the traces of the debauchery that Scott and his red-haired companion had inflicted upon her, and was surprised to note that most of the changes were interior.
The bruises, she knew, would go away in time, but the memory of her seduction in the mine would be forever etched darkly in her memory. With a deep sigh, she wrapped and tied a big orange towel around her curving nakedness and left the bathroom, stepping into her adjoining bedroom. For a moment she was taken aback to see the sleeping form of Dirk sprawled upon her bed. He must have heard her come in and gotten up to find out where she had been all day. She had been in the shower so long, he must have fallen asleep waiting for her.
She went to stand beside her bed, looking down at the sleeping man.
"Poor Dirk," she whispered to him. "Thank you for being so good to me. I'm sorry I've been such an ass."
Jassy felt that she even realized how much more there was of life yet for her to understand, and she sensed for the first time that perhaps nobody really ever understood it all. Yet this thought made her feel terribly alone, and the sad figure of the handsome miner, lying pale and exhausted on her bed, made her feel even more strangely melancholic. He was all alone too, wasn't he? Slowly, the pretty young blonde lay down beside him as the last light of the day was slowly filtering in through the window. It was warm and familiarly comfortable in her own bed, and Jassy eased her aching body, sighing deeply.
It was wonderful to be back home now in her little room, with Dirk right there beside her. She turned on her side and gazed with curiosity at his face. He looked younger to her somehow, with his features relaxed in sleep. From time to time, apparently dreaming, his expression would change and Jassy watched attentively as he muttered and called her name.
"No, Jassy! No!" he cried in his sleep, and then he began to thrash around restlessly so that Jassy had to move to her side of the bed to keep from being struck.
Oh Dirk, she thought sadly. Have I ruined your life for you?
Tenderly, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. What a wonderful friend he'd been to her, and how she'd abused his friendship, instead of fighting his concern, she should have trusted him, particularly about Scott Thorpe. How simple everything would have been if she'd only listened to him. Soothingly, the young girl patted Dirk's shirt-sleeves arm. But to her surprise, the sleeping man suddenly enfolded her small form in his arms and began to shower kisses on her face!
"Dirk wake up!" she said, trying to pull away from him.
But Dirk, caught up in the thrall of his dream, and operating from a completely unconscious level, continued to kiss Jassy's soft cheeks. Then incredibly, his searching tongue found Jassy's parted lips and slipped inside, probing fervently beyond her clenched teeth, seeking her own tongue and swirling heatedly within until the startled young blonde began to moan helplessly. The towel that covered her creamy white nakedness came undone as Dirk pulled her closer and closer to him.
Although Jassy at first tried to resist his unconscious caresses, she was soon surprised and delighted to find that his embrace was having an overwhelmingly soothing effect on her, and a strange magical aura seemed to shimmer around her as his hands moved along the silken surfaces of Jassy's naked skin. The blonde miner's daughter felt the sweetest kind of desire overtaking her exhausted body, as though beneath the raw lust that she had experienced with Amanda and Scott, there was something else, something that had to do with love and protection.
Willingly, her tongue began to probe back at his, as she allowed him to hold her close to his hard, muscular body, while his hands and fingers touched her everywhere, each caress erasing the awful shame that Scott had roused within her. She was being made whole again by Dirk's gentle desire-filled touches. His touch was healing her wounds like a blessing from heaven. If the outside world had nothing better to offer than Scott and Amanda, and their kind of degrading passion, then what she wanted was something more, something at once completely strange yet utterly familiar. She wanted Dirk Mulligan!