All for one. One for all.

Launching a rescue.

He reached into an alcove by the door and brought out an overcoat, putting it around her, and over her shoulders. She was not in the least shy with him now.

He dropped his flashlight that he’d used to light his way when running, into her pocket. He’d need that when they got over there.

He had that no-nonsense spark of urgency she needed to see.

He pulled on his sweatshirt. It would get wet again out in that rain, but he didn’t care.

“I’ll need some things. Pull this around you, put it on. It will keep the rain off you and help keep you warm.

“I’ll need a rope.” His mind was working fast.

He didn’t need a coat. It would just be more to carry, and it was a warmish rain. He’d manage.

He retreated to another part of the house where he knew there was a rope. That should be all he would need. The lighter the better.

She’d come here, of all places! And had he actually made love to her? No, he’d violated her, and it had been wrong, but she didn’t seem conscious of what had happened, thank goodness. It would be making love when they did it slowly, deliberately and consciously together, the next time. Soon.

His mind would eventually be able to deal with this, but he would also soon have to tell her what he’d done to her and take his chances then.

She fumbled with the buttons, except she gave up, her fingers not functioning for her as they should, as he could see when he returned with a coiled nylon rope; one his father used when he was taking trees down on the grounds.

He tried to help her with a few of the buttons, unavoidably touching her breasts as he did so, then leaned in to kiss her. He ached to tell her he loved her, but she would laugh at him and throw it back in his face as he deserved, but she accepted and even seemed to respond to that kiss.

He took a deep breath. “You are still bleeding, but the rain will always make everything appear so much worse than it is.”

She smiled at him, but there was a sad look behind that smile. “I’m alright now. They are not serious. Just scratches. We’ll see to them later. Sarah, first.”

We’ll see to them later. He was included in that statement.

He paused and looked into her face and eyes, motivated to say something to tell her that she was very beautiful, that he loved her, and that he was paining, internally, even more than he had hurt her, but it was the wrong place and not the right time for this kind of confession and conversation. They needed several hours to say even the start of what he felt for her.

He had no need to say anything. She already knew that he had fallen in love with her, just as she had fallen in love with him.

He sat to pull on his damp socks and sneakers.

He looped the rope over his shoulder, pulled the door wider and let them out.

“Stay, dog. Stay.” He closed the door behind them, knowing the dog would not go out of the flap on the other door to follow them. It was too wet outside. He’d got wet once with him on that run, and the stove was warm.

They walked out into the night, striding off together, in the direction of the school.

He hoped he was doing the right thing. It was the right thing. It was the only thing. He was in love. Where this woman went, he wanted to be.

“Who are you?” He needed to find out more about her, and to try and keep her mind off other things.

Her mind was becoming clear enough to answer.

“Le-an Wilson.”

She should tell him her name after what had happened between them; after he’d held her, touched her so personally, caressed her breasts, kissed her, fallen in love with her (yes, he’d done that too) … and that other violently intimate thing that he’d done to her, twice.

Fucking her. She could think it where she couldn't say it out loud.

Why had she not fought him away from her, scratched his eyes out, swore at him? Even cried with helpless frustration? Because she didn’t need to. It had been an accident, and at the same time a necessary baptism, bringing her forward into another life; one with him in it just as firmly as he had been into her body.

She still needed to think about that, and what she’d sensed about it as she’d come around. He had… yes, he had… done that to her, but she preferred to think of it now, in this sudden awakening, as the first and most difficult stage of making love, which is what it would always be between them from here forward. She tried to analyze what her body was telling her. All of him, every last millimeter of him had been deep into her down there, and he had ejaculated into her. Twice. Strange, that she did not feel devastated, or fired up enough to want to kill him, or to go the other way and to want to die of shame, of hurt, at being so helpless as that had happened to her.

Sarah, Olivia, Le-an.

He responded in kind. “I’m David, the grounds-man’s son. David Harmon. I work at the hospital. I’m a doctor there.” She should know everything about him, and soon would. He dare not tell her that he had fallen in love with her even as he'd f****d her. She might laugh at him. Or swear.

Telling her his name, might help her trust him better than she might want to do, and he couldn’t blame her for that, having f****d her before he’d even known her name.

Surely he was too young to be a doctor.

He kept the conversation alive. “What happened up there? How did it happen?”

She was able to talk more rationally now that they were moving, and something was changing for her in yet another positive way.

“Sarah slipped on the roof, slid down it, and will fall to the ground if we don’t get back to her, and soon. We have already been too long, but I got lost on the roofs in the dark, fell a couple of times, and couldn’t find all the ladders for a while and then….”

And then she’d met him.

They’d been only a few minutes at his cottage, though it felt as though hours had passed; time enough to change two lives, if not four of them. She’d wasted ten minutes or more getting off the roof, and more minutes after that, that she couldn’t remember as he’d done that other… to her. She needed to think about that, and how she would respond, except she’d already responded, and not as she’d expected to, faced with that happening to her.

She was glad she’d not violently fought him and pushed him away; her first inclination which had survived for just a few minutes. Then she’d looked into his eyes and had seen the hurt in them; the regret for having hurt her and for taking advantage of her as he had, for destroying her virginity. And it had been an accident. The first time. The second time had been neither hurtful, nor accidental. He had been unable to help himself. She understood that.

Now, she needed time, and a quiet place to examine her feelings about that, to understand them, and to learn more about him, though she knew almost all of what she needed to know.

Some things you just knew about.

Her adrenaline was flowing, she could also feel something else still leaking from her with each step. He’d put that into her. She needed to ask about that too. She had a lot of questions to ask him, but Sarah first.

“What were you doing on the roof?”

At least they were covering the ground fast. She had difficulty keeping up with him until he took her hand and helped her along.

He should have thought of something for her feet, but he’d not been thinking clearly back there. If they weren’t already tender, they would be by the time they got back onto that roof. Too late now. That towel, even some other clothing would also have been useful.

She shrugged deeper into the coat, holding it closed around her.

He could see nothing on the roof. Her sister must be out of sight in the dark up there and getting wet, cold and miserable.

She was able to open up to him more, now that they were moving, and making progress.

“We go out onto the roof sometimes when the evening is warm, to talk, except this evening was different. We didn’t expect this to happen.”

She said nothing about them pushing boundaries and undressing totally in the rain and then daringly peeing over the edge, directing the streams onto the sloping roof at their feet, and amazed at their shamelessness, standing there doing that with their legs apart, fumbling at themselves, as though they had been boys lined up, as boys did, as they directed it every which way.

“Just as we were ready to go back into the school was when Sarah was distracted by something and slipped on the edge of the roof and slid down it,” bringing their delightful evening up to that point, to a crashing and horrifying end as she disappeared down the roof.

Le-an could feel that cold hand of fear clutching at her guts, waiting to hear Sarah scream at any moment as she went over the edge. She’d wasted too much time getting her mind in order!

They could be too late already. Sarah could be lying, broken and crumpled in the bushes even now. All of their grandiose plans and ambitions together would be ended before they had begun, but they had already received a terminal blow when she’d looked up into his eyes. By falling in love as she had, she’d betrayed her sisters and everything they had been planning.

She hoped they would not be too late. How much time had she wasted back there with him, getting her mind back to where it should be after what he’d done to her, and in her struggle to get off the roof before that?

It would be her fault if Sarah fell just as they approached her.

She didn’t notice him reach into her side pocket to retrieve the flashlight.

Girls were not that much different from boys, meeting out of the way in special places, out of sight of the teachers and prefects.

He knew that the girls in this school often got up to other things after dark, never wanting to go back into the school while there was light enough to play.

He’d heard them and watched them in the dim lights over the lawns of an evening as they’d played hockey or had thrown a ball around. They had been indistinctly glimpsed shapes and voices, and with no chance of putting a voice to a face.

They hadn’t seen him back in the trees, just heading out for his run with his flashlight, and the bell would soon go, getting them to finish what they were doing and return to the school.

He’d turn his flashlight on when they got closer up under the building wall.

The headmistress was never predictable. He knew her overall routines. He had almost as much of an interest in them as the girls did. He didn’t want her to know his habit of going for a run at night or using the swimming pool or the gymnasium, once he’d let himself in with the key his father had.

If they knew he sometimes showered there, after curfew, imagining those tens of delightfully naked young bodies in those same showers just moments before, paddling through the same puddles of water still on the floor, he’d be in even more trouble.

A haunting thought that he had at those times, and still had, was imagining hundreds of naked female bodies floating through the same space he was in at that moment, showering with him, only time, separating them; their hauntingly sensed genitalia at that same approximate height as his always eager male parts; separated only by minutes or an hour or two, but aching for conscious interaction with them in that other dimension as he imagined touching all of their breasts within reach as he went into them, glided through them, one after the other.

Except for that time gap, he might have been intimate with all of them; floating through their bodies undetected, as he often dreamed of being. But the way things had been, never the twain would meet, damn!

Until tonight!

His mind was busy with what he was learning about Le-an, and about himself.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him when he’d been at the boys’ school. They had never encountered any of the usually tormenting girls there, except out in the village or wandering the cathedral in the city, though they knew even then what they wanted to do with those girls.

The girls were safe in public and could flash their admiring glances at those always eager and excited boys, knowing nothing awkward could develop where they were, so they were free to torment.

He and his friends often dreamed about meeting those girls in a less public place; in the woods, or out in the open fields, and what they would like to be doing to them in those private moments as they got rid of their clothes in a mutually desired effort, and came together for endless, mindless s*x.

They had always been dreams, just as now. Girls were never that cooperative or adventurous when it came to the sticking point. They did not see anything the same way boys did and had a tendency to run scared when anything began to become too personal and physical. That always would be their instinctive response (or one drilled into them by their mothers, too wise to the ways of men) when they were faced with an eagerly aroused male for the first time, showing off that stiffly erect part just for them, with them admiring it, seeing that male intensity, and him wanting all of their clothes off, and not just their panties to be pulled aside for a mutual showing of their differences as they played doctors.

The time for games like that had long gone by. With puberty, came serious, mind-destroying intent.

It would soon change again in a few more years when the initially gentle, but nonetheless serious games changed again, and the maturing young women needed to ensnare a certain man as lover or husband in whichever way they could—and never mind the initial playing around—and before the opportunity passed out of reach, or he was snapped up by another more adventurous and less inhibited woman who knew exactly what she wanted.

In that fearsome cut-throat competition, they would have no hesitation letting their guards down and getting their panties off fast enough just for him to learn about them in a serious way, if that was what it would take to capture him and keep him out of the hands of those other women.

Le-an cautioned him. “Better not use your flashlight until we’re climbing to the roof, it might be seen, and no one should find out about this.”

Especially not about what had happened to her over the end of that settee.