[milkman56]

Excerpt:

It had always seemed to me that she wanted to do what she seemed uncertain to do. She was hesitant, but never reluctant. She was timid, but not unwilling. She was shy and embarrassed, but not ashamed. And if she felt humiliation in any of things she did, if she felt embarrassed, truthfully she could not distinguish between the warmth of that blush and the warmth of the sexual flush that she also felt at the same time. Perhaps, because her mother had repressed her feelings and taught her to be so uncertain of herself sexually, she needed the anxiety of humiliation and a sense of coercion to make her fully sexually aroused. I don’t know. But the way she responded to what happened to her, I think this is true, even if she would never admit it. How they treated her made her want to do what she did, even if she would never admit it.

Anyway, I think Mr. Miller saw all of this in her instantly, just as I did. I thought about it right after I met him when he had hired her. I saw it in the way he looked at her. I said something to her about it, but she did not understand me. She said he was a nice man. And he paid her very well. Too well, as I should have known.

He had a small jewelry shop downtown, had had it for years. Never made much money at it and had been robbed ore than a few times and was barely hanging on, really. His wife was a b*tchy nag. I only met her once and I could see why he preferred to work all the time. So, I was not surprised when Karen’s hours begin to get longer.

I asked her about it—what are you doing so late?—and so on. And she said they talked. He was teaching her about gems. And it was true. At least at first.

He would make tea after he closed the shop, and they would sit side by side on stools at his workbench, and he would take gems out of this little packets and give her a loop so she could examine them with him while he explained them to her. She really did learn a lot. Well, that turned out to be true in lots of ways.

This long evening work became more and more frequent, and then one day he had her stay on a Friday night, although the shop was always closed on weekends. She explained to me later that his wife had gone out of town and he was lonely.

She did not get home until almost ten and I could tell she had been drinking. That was not quite the first time things happened, but it was the first serious incident.

Actually she’d been coming up with a bit of booze on her breath for a couple of weeks. And she had admitted that he had started putting brandy in the tea that the two of them drank together.

Later I pieced together the whole thing after she told me, and after Bob had told me more. It happened this way. It started with an arm around her as he showed her things. It progressed to a kiss goodnight. It went from this to his sitting beside her and telling her about how unhappy he was with his wife and intimating things about a lack of a sex life, which embarrassed her, but which she permitted. She tried to make him feel better. She felt sorry for him. And he would ask her if she liked him and she would say she did.

Then, inevitably, he confided that he was in love with her, that she was so beautiful, and that he knew she was married and that he would do nothing to hurt her, that he wanted to help her, that he wanted her to have things, he wanted to give her things. He gave her a ring. He insisted she take it, although she knew it was a genuine diamond. She must have known this was wrong, because she hid the ring from me.

He wept when he gave her the ring, and she had to accept it, she said. That was the first night that he kissed her mouth, and she was docile to him at first, and then when he kept up, she felt sorry for him and kissed him back. They kissed for a while. Warmly, I think. She said nothing more happened, but I wondered if he did not put his hands on her too. But she insisted nothing happened.

But now this became the common thing. Drinking and then kissing and he putting his hands onto her and she said he took her hand and put it on himself and she rubbed his erection through his pants....