That was in mid-April. Two weeks later came the spring formal. If you are wondering how much religious angst, self-recrimination, second-guessing, and general worrying a sedevacantist Catholic and an Apostolic Pentecostal can produce when coming out of the closet to each other and falling in love, or maybe, if we are being honest with each other, in an infatuation so overwhelming and hopeless that it seems virtually indistinguishable from love, the answer is: A lot.

None of that was enough to stop us from succumbing to desire, of course.

A cynical part of me even wonders if maybe the guilt and existential torment added spice. Few things, after all, are tastier than forbidden fruit. If that was the case, the hot sauce had a very limited shelf life. Before the school year was out, I had gone sort of generically Unitarian, bordering on Emersonian transcendentalism, with occasional moments of "what the hell can we even know about all this, anyway?" and a heavy dose of New Age; and my girlfriend, meanwhile, eventually converted to Wicca after she ignored her resolution to stay completely in the closet and poured her heart out to one of the townies, a motherly sort of schoolteacher who, like us, was a member of the local medieval reenactment group. A motherly schoolteacher whom she wound up seducing, many months later. It's funny how things work out, isn't it?

She lies on her bed, naked. I was the one who undressed her. Her long, dark hair and tiny frame take my breath away. I've never seen anyone like her. I've studied the nude female form in works of art – statues, nude paintings, that sort of thing, I took an art history course this year – but nothing prepared me for her. She is radiant.

Her formal dress, a confection made of navy blue and white striped taffeta and ruffles, lies crumpled on the floor. My long yellow vintage granny gown, with the square neckline and lace and seed pearls that made me think I was Juliet Capulet the first time I tried it on, lies on top of it in coital abandon, a single filmy cotton sleeve nudged into a wrinkly crevasse of navy satin. The dresses seem surer of themselves than we are.

I swallow past the lump in my throat to kiss her lips. When her mouth opens and her tongue darts out to meet mine, I taste the blackberry wine we've each had a glass of.

One of us is trembling. I don't even know which one of us it is.

I want every inch of her. Her ears. Her dark walnut hair, which smells like flowery shampoo. Her eyes. Her cheeks. Her throat, oh, her throat, which feels like rich, smooth silk.

I resolve to kiss her everywhere no matter how long it takes.

Her musk blends with the vanilla scent emanating from the lit candle that sits on her dresser.

"My lady," I whisper as I kiss her hand, one reverent kiss, then another and another until I am covering her in a flurry. When I work my way up her arm until I finally reach a small and perfectly pointed breast, she moans, and the gasp she makes when I take her nipple in my mouth lances my heart.

The candle flickers and makes wild dancing shadows on the wall.

She has small feet, almost dainty. I bend down on my knees to worship them before working my way up her legs. Her skin, by candlelight, is a perfect shade of ivory, aside from the areas where the shadows dance; and soft, so soft.

Thighs like white satin.

Lips ripe as berries, and the juice as sweet.

A moan like a dove's cry.

Oh, my lady. Let me fill the night with your cries. I want to hear nothing else. I want my ears to be filled with your beauty.

Then came May, and with May, spring finals, and the end of the semester. We had a private graduation celebration of our own, beautiful, wretched, passionate, ecstatic, and above all, awkward.

"You want me to what?"

"Tie me up."

I blink. "Okay... Um. Why?

She looks at me shyly with one eye, dark hair in curtains around her face, while her lazy eye stares off in the distance somewhere. I always found that trait fascinating, although she says it's more a nuisance than anything else – only being able to use one eye means she has no three-dimensional vision, so her depth perception is nonexistent, and she's made clumsiness into a form of ballet.

"I think it would be fun."

Oh, well, in that case, why not.

I look around the room. I don't see anything that would be very useful for this. Her bags are already packed – graduation is tomorrow, and she leaves immediately thereafter – no doubt she has scarves or a bathrobe with a tie or something I could use, but I'd have to rummage through her bags to find them, and I don't want to have to make her repack all her belongings.

I'm wearing a pair of argyle socks that go up to my knees; maybe they'll do, although all things considered, I'd better keep them away from her face. Maybe if I tie one around each ankle, on the metal frame of the standard-issue dorm bed? It will stretch my socks out something wicked, but they'll probably shrink back after a wash or two.

Perplexedly, I get to work. I don't see where the "fun" enters in, but maybe she knows something I don't.

On the other hand, she is on the bed, and so am I, and that's nothing to be displeased about. I lie down next to her and take her into my arms as best I can. As always, everything about her is sweet, from her freshly shampooed hair to her skin to her breath, which tastes of peaches when I kiss her. The dining halls served peach pie as a dessert option tonight.

Her lips are so perfectly shaped that I find myself running my finger over them, around and around, and she giggles and lunges for my finger with her teeth. I pull back.

"Uh-uh," I murmur. "No biting. Not allowed."

Her breath quickens.

What on earth? All I said was, "No biting."

"What are you thinking about?" I whisper, almost afraid to hear the answer.

"You," she replies.

Well. That's gratifying. I kiss her and take my time before surfacing. Her increasingly ragged breath urges me on.

"Naked. I'm naked, too."

That's even better, and it's what I was longing for tonight, anyway. "I think that can be arranged," I say, and strip my clothes off slowly, one article at a time, doing my best to caress myself with my blouse and jeans as I remove them. She watches me with hungry eyes. I start to remove her clothing next, although I realize when I get to her trousers and underwear, that I won't be able to completely remove them because I tied her ankles to the bed with my socks. I can only push them down as far as I can get them to go.

Her body stretches before me in the evening half-light. Tonight is the last night I'll be able to see her before the school year starts up again in the fall, at the very earliest, and I gaze at her fixedly, trying to memorize her every curve and muscle.

"And there are whips and chains in the room."

Wait. Stop. What? What would I possibly do with – My mind boggles. Clearly, her imagination is a little more fertile than mine.

"All I have is myself," I reply, and cover her mouth with mine before she has a chance to say something else that will confuse me even more. Some intuition, though, tells me to reach down between her legs. She is soaking wet, and within seconds, she shudders and cries out.

That was all it took to make her come?

I think for a moment, then lean onto her body, pinning her shoulder underneath mine while I bend around to bring my mouth to her ear. I don't move my hand. "Maybe you'd better tell me what you want in a little more detail," I whisper. "I'm not quite sure I caught all that."

Her breath catches again, and she starts to buck against me.

I don't get much sleep. I learn a great many odd and baffling things about the contents of her imagination, though.

That was my freshman year as an undergraduate, and at the end, my girlfriend went away to Vermont for the summer to share an apartment with another one of the graduating sorority sisters, while I let myself get dragged back home to my parents because I didn't know what else I could do with myself.

We wrote letters every day – desperate letters, letters that we carefully intercepted before anybody else could see the mail. We wrote each other poetry. We sent each other little tokens of our affection: locks of hair, pretty flowers we crushed and dried and inserted into cards; poetry, more poetry. Oh, the poems we wrote. And we talked endlessly on the telephone. Every day I would take a long walk to a phone booth in the little public park that sat on the corner of a shopping district in my neighborhood, and call her collect because I didn't have an endless supply of quarters; and we would sigh hopelessly at each other, telling each other all the things we wished we were doing to each other, which, in retrospect, weren't all that extensive, but they were much desired nonetheless. Had she been there for me to hold, I would have happily died in her arms.

When school started up again, she went to graduate school at a large state university about an hour away from me to the north, and we tried to keep things going, but what long-distance relationship can possibly survive when neither partner has any way of visiting the other? Neither of us had cars – she did not exactly come from a moneyed background, although she was by no means poor, and my parents did not believe in feeding me with a silver spoon, for all that our family had wealth. What I wanted, I had to earn, and I had yet to find a job that would pay me enough to let me afford a car of my own. Meanwhile, although she didn't talk about it much until the very end of our relationship, she was starting to see other women. My place was not secure.

It didn't take either of us long to slide from indoctrinated chastity to bouquets of lovers, and that should surprise no one. Ever see a kid with sudden freedom and an allowance to spend let loose in a candy store after years of being forced to live on nothing but macrobiotic health food?

We still wrote and called each other, trying to keep things alive despite the impossibility of the situation; I even took a Greyhound bus to see her a few times, a trip that took several hours each way, because the bus did not travel a direct route, but rather made a circuit through two major cities, laying over in one of them for an hour before winding back to the town my girlfriend's university was located in.

All this cost money, and eventually, that had some terrible consequences for me, because I hadn't been as discreet as I thought I'd been.

A clean break probably would have been wiser, but I was young, and I was foolish, and I was driven by the noisy demands of my passions rather than the clear advice of my rational mind. Also, just maybe, I was following the dictates of my inner calling, even then. My fall from grace did, after all, get me onto the path on which I sought truth; had things continued to be easy and my life sheltered, I would not have become who I am now. Perhaps I engineered my own fall without letting myself know it.

At any rate, that was summer.

After summer came my sophomore year, which I at least got to attend half of before losing my family name, my funds, and my right to attend classes in the white brick buildings of my college campus; and a couple of incidents stand out that, I think, shaped me significantly as well, although at the time they seemed rather minor.

One involved something that transpired between me and a fellow member of the college concert choir...