He forgot caution and put one hand on her knee, just below the spreading skirt. Her legs parted a little, and he slid his hand up over the kneecap and against the inside of her thigh. The flesh was smooth and very warm.

Throbbing anxiety took him. She had let him go this far; had he reached the limit? If he should expose himself, if he dared, would she take flight and bear a story to her parents that he could hardly deny?

His hand moved on, sliding past boundaries he had hardly dared imagine before. Abruptly it met the junction of her thighs. The soft down told him that she wore no underclothing here, either. Shivering with tension and excitement, he explored farther—and found a thick moisture.

Blood! he thought, shocked. I have trespassed and I have hurt her and now she is bleeding!

He snatched his hand away and lay beside her with the drumbeat of his heart filling the hideout. What have I done! he thought.

Visions of consequence obsessed his mind. The outrage of Eighty-One, the shame of Five. “Why did you do it, you lecherous juvenile!” they would say. “Don’t you know you must never touch a girl there?” Would they have to take her to a hospital? How would he ever get her back to her room?

The passion in him died, blasted away by his crime. His eyes stared into the faint cross-lace of branching shrubbery above, limned against the starry sky—a sky not one whit colder than the clutching terror in his heart. What have I—what—she’s only thirteen!

Jill’s hand touched his arm. “Aton?”

He jumped. “Believe me, I never meant to—”

“What’s the matter with you, all of a sudden?” she demanded, rolling over to peer into his face.

Didn’t she know? “The blood. There’s blood.”

She stared. “Blood? What are you talking about?”

“Down—between—I felt it. I never—”

”You’re crazy. It’s not the time of the—” Suddenly she giggled. “Blood? You mean you thought that was—? Haven’t you ever done this before?”

He lifted his head, finding her hot breasts close under his chin. “Before?”

“You don’t know!” she exclaimed, the thoughtless child in her ascendant over the dawning woman. “You really don’t! And here all the time I was looking up to you, waiting for you. I thought you were the big boy.”

Aton cowered behind his raging shame, unable to reply.

Abruptly she was the woman again. “I’m sorry, Aton. I guess you don’t get out much. Here—I’ll show you how—”

But he was on his hands and knees, scrambling away from her, barging out, finding the open night and running, sick with shock and embarrassment.

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