moment and then slowly followed her.
That evening, alone in-her quarters-two rooms at the far end of a wing of the convent — Lucrezia, garbed only in a dressing gown, waited for Carlotta to come. She was almost certain she would come although the girl had given her no answer. She knew how the possibility of sexual adventure could play on one's nerves, stimulating, frightening, exciting all at the same time.
For Lucrezia, too, this would be the first lesbian experience and the idea filled her with the same lustful chill of eagerness that her first fuck had — especially as she had been deprived of her conjugal and fraternal rights for some weeks now.
She found herself unable to keep still as the minutes went by following evensong. She rose time and time again and looked out of the sloping window down to the grounds. At last she sat on her bed and tried to concentrate on the pages of Boccaccio's II Decamerone which she had smuggled into the convent with her.
As time passed she became more and more anxious. If Carlotta didn't come now she would die of frustration. She put down the book and stared out of the window again before walking into the next room where she studied herself in a small, silver-backed hand mirror.
Her heart leapt as there came a light tapping on her door. She ran to open it and almost clasped the young girl to her bosom as she drew her into her room.
Carlotta smiled at her briefly and stood uncertainly just inside the door while Lucrezia closed and bolted it.
“Make yourself at home,” Lucrezia urged, turning around to her.
Nervously, the girl went to the window, and locked out as if to reassure herself that the outside world was there, solid and unchanged. Lucrezia watched her pretending to interest herself in the exploration of the rooms, pretending to examine the few books, flicking pages over with a pointless speed.
“I was afraid to come,” she said at last. “Wasn't that ridiculous — we are quite free to visit one another's rooms.”
“We are quite free to act as we please,” Lucrezia added.
“Yes,” the girl said uncertainly.
“I have another gown — why don't you make yourself more comfortable and put it on,” Lucrezia suggested.
She handed over the garment and Carlotta took it nervously.
Lucrezia turned away and studied II Decamerone, listening to the rustle of clothes as Carlotta slipped out of them. She kept swallowing with nervous excitement.
At a well-judged moment she glanced around and caught her companion naked. Carlotta gazed at her with wide, embarrassed eyes and Lucrezia glanced back at her book immediately. But not before she'd had a glimpse of the girl's small, firm breasts, high up and dark, with the splodge of dark nipple giving them body, and her slim figure below it with the eye-catching fuzz of dark hair above her thighs. Lucrezia felt almost matronly beside the girl's small proportions.
She did not look up again until the girl came and sat beside her on the bed. Carlotta seemed to have lost some of her uncertainty. It was as if she'd reminded herself that she had, after all, come for a specific purpose and that there was no point in trying to pretend she hadn't.
Lucrezia replaced the book on a shelf over the bed and lay back on it, looking at her companion. Carlotta looked even more attractive out of her nun's somber garb, and the long V-neck of the gown revealed a smooth stretch of her succulent-looking skin between her breasts. The beginning of their bulge on either side of the valley of flesh was heaving with a nervous emotion.
“You are really very lovely,” Lucrezia told her. “It was a great mistake for a girl like you to get such a mad idea in her head that she wanted to pass the rest of her days in a tomb.” The conversation brought a sense of normalcy with it and Carlotta's voice hid a trace of relief as if a spell had been broken.
“If you hadn't come, I might never have realized it,” she answered.
“Sooner or later you would have — but I'm glad it's through me that your revolution is to be achieved.”
Carlotta had again, as in the afternoon, become lost in Lucrezia's eyes. They seemed to hold her hypnotically. She came, as if Lucrezia had commanded her, and lay down on the bed beside her. Lucrezia touched the girl's cheek, lightly.
“Remember that this is the only way to liberate yourself from the horror and monotony of a death in life,” she said softly as her lips followed her hand.
Lucrezia was not very surprised to find that a relationship with a woman gave her as strong an erotic urge as with a man. It was as if it were something she'd always known, even when her conscious thought had included nothing but images of Cesare's, her father's, Giovanni's embraces. Now, she felt the soft smooth skin of the girl's cheek against her lips, a softness and a leafy fragrance which were missing in a man, and she felt her spirit stirred with the upsetting excitement of a new and forbidden experience about to come to fruition.
She slipped her hand into the girl's gown and Carlotta winced. Then her hand was caressing the small, firm breast with the lightest of touches. Her lips moved over the girl's face without losing contact — and found her lips. The lips were still, slightly reluctant and unsure. But as Lucrezia's hand moved from one breast to the other and tweaked the nipple, as her tongue played hide and seek with Carlotta's lips, the mouth opened with a sound which was near to a sigh, the lips relaxed and then kissed back.
Lucrezia's tongue gave up its game and lunged right out to fill the mouth which opened and spread at its assault.
Gently, her hand untied the belt of the gown. The material slipped slowly down to the bed off the glossy flesh of Carlotta's hips and thighs.
Lucrezia's hand rested on the girl's waist for a moment, the index finger playing with her navel. She noticed the girl was trembling faintly, like a leaf in the merest zephyr. She let her hand float away over the glassy expanse of flesh, lingering, unhurried, exploring every part while her tongue continued to caress the moist, heavily-breathing lips.
As her advancing fingers encountered the silky van of pubic hair, she slowed. She let her fingers course through it as through money. Under it she could feel the flesh swollen in a little mound, like a slight rise in the ground covered with a fine grass.
Carlotta wriggled her hips very slightly. She seemed ashamed of their movement, which was like an effort at escape.
Lucrezia sucked heavily on the lips which were trembling now in unison with the body.
With her free hand, she awkwardly unpulled her own belt and then pushed the plump flesh of her thigh against Carlotta's.
Slowly, as if stroking a timid animal, she allowed her fingers to continue on their downward progress. They moved down the rise and into the hot, little hollow between the oozing flesh of Carlotta's tightly-gripped thighs. Her path was barred for the moment by the instinctive inward pressure of those thighs. She stroked all the flesh she could reach and was rewarded with a sudden seepage of moisture around her fingers.
She moved her lips off Carlotta's and kissed her neck.
“Relax, darling,” she whispered. “Open your legs.”
“I can't bear it,” Carlotta whispered back after a moment. “It makes me jump every time you touch me.”
“All right — just let it go naturally. It'll come.”
Lucrezia went on with her gentle fondling. The hollow was very warm now and Carlotta was letting out an odd “oh” every so often from deep down in her throat.
Moving her lips down the neck, over the slim shoulders, Lucrezia invaded the breasts which were taut and straining with sensation. She closed her mouth over a nipple and sucked hard and strong, bringing forth gasps of torment from the girl.
Carlotta's thighs relaxed and, awaiting her moment, Lucrezia was able suddenly to advance her fingers so that the texture of flesh changed and she knew she was in the beginning of the wet ravine formed by those nether lips. Carlotta clasped her thighs together again, crushing the tormenting hand, but Lucrezia bore the weight and tickled the wet flesh with her fingertips.
She drew on the nipple again with her lips, sucking in as much of the breast behind it as she could.
