deader than dead, the topic today. However, here's a bit of understated you know what:
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"Tell me how and when you learned how to speak French."
I opened my eyes to a sky full of wheeling birds and moving cloud. The breeze, just short of actual wind on this early April day, had a voice: rest, it seemed to say, spring is actually here and you're another year older and another year wiser and another year stronger.
"Amanda? Are you sleeping? Because, do wake up, if you're sleeping."
I turned my head lazily, and regarded Rupert. We were, incongruously, in a punt on the River Cherwell, eddying and occasionally being held in place by Rupert's inexpert handling of the pole. By rights, we should have been very much elsewhere. It was too early in the season for punting, we were too young at fifteen and sixteen, respectively, to hire a punt, and in fact, we had been sent off to the Bodleian, to research a demon with a name full of rending consonants in it. Rupert had been given his father's membership card; we had gone to the Bodleian's Divinity rooms, looked vaguely around, decided that no mention of the demon was to be found, and gone off to climb Carfax Tower instead. After standing in the speaking wind with Oxfordshire spread out below us, we had clambered back down.
"What shall we do now?" I asked idly. I was enjoying my sense of stolen freedom from schoolwork and Slayer training, and I was certainly in no hurry to return to the confines of the Carolan, or Richard Giles' fish-eye.
"Would you like to go out on the river?" Rupert made the suggestion in a voice too innocent to credit. "I've, well, I've brought some sandwiches, and a flask of lemonade; it's in the carrybag at the front of my bicycle. We could rent a punt for a few hours, pretend to be undergraduates."
We'd done precisely that. Richard Giles' card might well have been some sort of passport, opening every forbidden door in Oxford. Rupert showed the card and was given punt and pole without any reference made to the fact that we were both obviously well below the age requirement. I hid any dubiousness I felt about whether his inexperience with the pole might leave us stranded midstream, took some comfort in the paddles at the bottom of the punt, and pulled out a cheese and pickle sandwich and an apple. I also hoped the river wouldn't be too crowded; everyone in this university town seemed to know who we were, and there were any number of them I was sure would be delighted to report to my Watcher that his young ward and his son had played truant, or been seen where they'd no earthly business being.
In fact, the Cherwell was empty. Either everyone had chosen the Isis, or else the weather on this mid-week day was even more unsuited to punting than I'd realised. We bumped about on the water, laughing as sudden strong gusts of wind snatched away our serviettes and carried them to the boughs of trees on the lee shore, eating our sandwiches, talking about weapons training and the long-dead demon with the impossible name and my precious, newly-purchased copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Eventually, conversation grew desultory, then downright languid. I slept.
But here was Rupert, asking me the question his father never had. I didn't know if Richard Giles didn't care, or took it for granted. It was possible that his mistrust of me, apparent to even the dullest eye, would keep him from believing any answer I might have given. That was unfair; I would have told him only the truth, had he asked. But he never had.
"My father taught me French. From the time I was born."
Rupert had lay down beside me. We weren't moving; the wind had stilled, and so had the current. Everything suddenly seemed very still, very quiet, as if there was a maelstrom just beyond the quiet facade of willows and meadows and the dark green spine of water upon which we lay, a maelstrom invisible because we were in the eye of it.
"He wasn't with you, was he?" Rupert's voice was quiet; he, too, had sensed something, a moment perhaps, awaiting its time to happen. "Not living with you, and your mother, in London?"
"No." I let my eyes rest on Rupert's profile. He'd taken the glasses off and I saw how clean the lines of his face were, how sharply defined, how beautifully limned. Something thickened in me, a sudden tension, a coagulation in my belly, new to me. "But he was there. We spoke in dreams, every night. He taught me - he showed me what my power was. He taught me French, he taught me how to cast in French."
"He was a sorcerer." Rupert's voice had an odd tinge to it. It took a moment before I identified it as envy. "A loving sorcerer. Not anything like mine, then."
"A sorcerer, yes. Nothing like Richard." I turned my head and touched his lips with my hand, a light, consolatory touch. "I'm so sorry."
The kiss was inevitable; tentative at first, but not shy. Urgency came next, hands on each other, one hand moving down a breast, my mouth against his, following what seemed to me to be a logical path, down to his navel, his groin, both of us finding zippers, tongues touching first light, then violent, a coupling, a mating, coming together and the punt rocking wildly, spinning and then stopping as two healthy young animals came together.
When it was done, he rolled sideways and sat up, zipping his trousers. He looked stunned, pleased, and very triumphant. It was, in fact, everything I felt. I lay in the punt, my body bruised and laughing.
"Oh dear," he remarked, and sounded hilarious, a wizened old teenaged man who'd just had his first woman, "we've lost the pole. What are you laughing at?"