Soul Siren by Aisha Duquesne

our private rain-forest, her fingers were back inside me, and the steady rhythm was at first deliciously pleasurable and then the tingle of my very first orgasm began in my thighs and rushed through me. “Uuuhhmmm! Eeeeeuuuhhhmm! Eeeeuuuhhh!” The sensation I couldn’t feel when Bobby Drake put his cock into me with a bull-in-a-china-shop force in a friend’s rec room, taking my virginity and leaving me hollow. This was different. Ecstasy.
    I watched my teacher slither down into the shallow lake of shower water, me so ignorant, so naïve and without a clue, until she put her mouth on me, and I didn’t recognise myself from my moans. As I lay there afterwards, panting and spent, she sat up and smiled, her face so cheerfully grateful that she could give me this, rivulets of water slowly running down her flat belly and the tops of her thighs, a sheen of light on her golden brown breasts now completely visible through the soaked bra. The tuft of her black fur was a vague cloud behind the wet panties, and it was the slight protrusion of her hipbones, such a girlish detail, that made me want to take her.
    I lay there as the water sloshed up against my shoulder blades and flowed around my ass and heels, and I stretched out a hand, my eyes thanking her, telling her I wanted to give love back.
    “Come home with me,” she said. Then she smiled and added, “But not just yet.”
    She rose to her feet and slipped off her panties, unhooked her bra, and I beheld the fullness of her, the full flowering of this mature woman. Her straight black hair trailed like a mane all the way down to the small of her back, accentuating the beautiful curve of her round ass. She was incredibly exotic to me. I got to my feet, and I took a bar of soap in my hand and lathered her buttocks. She seemed to swoon and put out her hands against the tiles, and I ran the soap around to her belly and lathered her breasts. We kissed for the first time in a soapy wet embrace under the pounding of the shower water, and it was another first for me. Lips that yielded to mine, that let me coil my tongue around hers in a dance and didn’t invade my mouth with a masculine brutishness.
    I remember afterwards her buttoning her suit jacket to cover her drenched blouse and squealing over the chill of the wet cotton on her skin. Her skirt was dry enough for us to “escape.” I remember her driving me back to her house, both of us very quiet. I remember my first impression of her décor, a mixture of Indian curios, like the multi-armed statue of Shiva, and Fifties-style furniture. You wouldn’t think they would go together, but she had blended them well. I didn’t know much about Indian culture then, still don’t to be honest, but I noticed briefly the depictions of the Indian god Krishna on the walls. He was blue in some framed pictures and black in others. “Those belonged to my ex-husband,” she explained. “I should really get around to buying some new things to hang up.” But two whole walls in her living room were already completely covered in books, one shelf devoted to feminist literature, another to novels by Hanif Kureshi, Arundathi Roy, Salman Rushdie.
    I asked her about a couple of books, still foolishly calling her Miss Ogis, and she smiled and replied, “I think you can call me Karen here.”
    I was seventeen. I was still in the stage where I blurted out everything that came into my head. “You don’t have an Indian first name?”
    “Sure I do,” she answered. “But I don’t use it. I was born here, grew up here, and I’m kind of between two cultures. White people just mangle our pronunciations anyway. Karen’s easier. If I get to know you better, maybe one day I’ll tell you the other name.”
    I felt a peculiar shock of hurt. But I was young, holding on to the foolish teenage assumption that intimacy was a leveller, that it made us equals. One minute we were lovers, the next I naturally deferred to her.
    “Would you like some tea?” she