Free Project Passion by Dusty Miller Page A

desire to be held, understandable in someone
who had been geeky and awkward since she was seventeen. Torn from
her family and isolated from the world. It was more than simple
curiousity. It was the yearning to be desired. She wanted someone
to want her, as much as anything. She wanted, needed, someone to
want her body. It was a craving. She wondered what it was like to
make a man drool, running rough hands all over her.
    Perhaps it was not unnatural, when she
recalled. As a seventeen year-old she honestly believed that she
would be alone forever…and it was natural for thoughts to stray,
and to wonder if she was indeed a fallen woman, even without
actually doing anything. She’d fallen in love with others. Men who
were attractive but somehow those fantasies never worked out in
tangible fashion. The notion that she was ugly and no one wanted
her was one of the factors that led to her into entering the
convent in the first place. It was honest confusion. Perhaps it was
the fear of the unknown, the fear of life itself. It felt cowardly,
looking back now.
    Heather was just old-fashioned. She
knew all the words—she’d read a few books.
    The words came easily, words learned
the first day of school, standing in the yard waiting for the bell
to ring.
    All the usual words. Every
kindergarten kid knew them.
    No, Heather was scared witless. And
yet she had found the courage at last, to acknowledge the secret
yearnings for what they were. She had found the courage to act.
There were fantasy men she still loved, still missed, still
wondered about after all these years, and all of that was a side
issue.
    It was still difficult, of course, no
matter what people said these days. She still thought of it in the
old terms, in terms of revilement and hatefulness. Deep inside, she
knew. She knew.
    Maybe it all came down to who you were
born to be—and maybe Heather was fooling herself when she
masturbated, dreaming of a certain someone whom she could never
quite visualize except in the most obvious—and perverse—terms that
she possibly could. It’s like they barely had faces. What a sad
thought. One day her thoughts turned to black men. For some reason
that really did it for her. It was Satan tempting her.
    Heather was more scared now than that
first time, when she went on the internet. She turned on ‘Private
Browsing,’ not that that would ultimately deter the marketers. But
they didn’t care who or what she was, not nearly so much as she
did. She knew no other life…
    Always careful to delete her browsing
history, in case someone else would click on it and know who had
been on it. Feeling dirty and dishonest using the house laptop in
her room late at night…it always turned on something deep inside of
her, though. This much was undeniable truth.
    Quickly snapping off the
page almost as soon as she had seen it, and then when she sat
thinking about it for a long time afterwards. The truth was that
this was just fantasy, one she had never dared to act upon in even
the slightest way. The obvious conclusion was that she never would.
When she met men in the wild as she thought of it, sitting around in bingo, or
attending out of a sense of duty, Saturday bazaars and such, all
about in the greater world once or twice, she’d actually gotten an
oddly passionate feeling while talking to them in vague terms.
Sooner or later, they always told you if they were married or if
they had a girlfriend, or if they had children.
    The thought of them as men always hit
her. It always came back to sex.
    It was like home schooling. They
always told you. Heather had never mentioned her thoughts to
anyone. That was for sure.
    When she was young and insecure, the
knowledge that she was a wanton thing was too much information. She
didn’t want to know. She was so unsure of it either way. It’s not
like she was going to suddenly leave her calling, meet a man, and
have a string of babies anytime soon, but this was just something
she had always wanted to do.