In the morning Faye was cautioned by her mother to come home directly after school and, “Don’t test me, young lady!”

From 8.30 to 10.00 they had a geography exam, with lots of questions about oil, this being Odessa. Faye had trouble with quite a few of the questions, but she did alright—using common sense went a long way. Afterwards, as all the kids around her evaluated the questions, Faye sat thinking, pondering, and came to the conclusion: they left her no other choice.

She took her bag, said she was going to the bathroom, and as calmly as possible walked out of the school, down the steps, not looking back. She took some deep breaths at the bicycle rack, and then rode off quick.

What else could she do? Circumstances all added up to this course of action. One: Her parents had started to act like her jailers. Two: There was no way for Johnny to contact her without risking getting in a lot of trouble. Three: She had to talk to him.

Sure, skipping school would get her into more trouble. She would surely be missed at some point, and a teacher would have the school call her mother. And what was her mother going to do? Get more angry than she already was? Threaten Faye with what? Faye believed her mother had already done her worse, so there was really no getting into more trouble than she already was.

Her father hadn’t even looked at her during breakfast. It had made her feel horrible, but she also thought it pretty unfair. Even the twins had been uncommonly quiet, aware of the atmospheric pressure in the room.

The shantytown appeared peaceful in the morning light. Most men were off to work, children shrieked and tumbled about.

Faye rode to the lemurian section of the village, and had some trouble locating Johnny’s shack as they all looked alike. She still moved about very cautiously. She knew Johnny’s scary mother wouldn’t be home, she would be doing chores for the other lemurians, who of course lived in all the other shacks, so at any moment the mother could appear from anywhere. Pearly might be home, but that would be fine with Faye.

She put her bike against a tree, and walked nervously towards Johnny’s home. There were some aged lemurians outside down the road, gathered around a table, engrossed in something, as if they were playing a board game. They didn’t see her. She increased her pace, without actually running, until she was hidden from view by another shack.

At Johnny’s door she wondered if she should knock. She didn’t. The door was unlocked, and she opened it slowly. At first she thought the single room was empty, but then she noticed him, sleeping on his cot. Thank god, he was alright.

And the moment she wanted to call to wake him up, he suddenly shook in his bed, and woke up with a choking noise. He sat up in alarm. His big eyes found Faye, and he looked at her in horror. Faye was nailed to the floor. Time stood still. Then he jumped out of his bed, giving Faye quite a scare (while part of her was alert enough to notice his gorgeous tail), and Johnny cried, “Stay away!” Seeming genuinely scared of her. He pushed his body against a wall, as far away from her as the little room allowed. “Stay away!” he said again, looking around in panic, and then he threw himself out of the glassless window.

This was getting a bit much.

She could hear him breathing hard outside, breathing in and out and in, presumably crouched under the window.

“Faye!” he called frenziedly, “please stay where you are! Don’t come to the window!”

Okay, she thought, still petrified, that was progress. ‘Stay where you are’ was better than ‘stay away’.

“Tell me what’s wrong with you, Johnny!” she yelled at the window.

“I don’t know! I’m sorry, I don’t understand what’s wrong! It’s just, something has changed, something about you! It must be your scent, it’s changed somewhat, very subtly, but it drives me crazy! I can’t think straight, I can’t control— I can hardly smell you from here, so I’m fine now, but when you get too close, I’m afraid I’ll…”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You what, Johnny? You’ll hurt me?”

“No, no, it’s not like that! It’s— I do feel like I could eat you, but not literally. It’s, well, lust…”

“Oh! …oh…” Well, she thought, this wasn’t a bad thing, was it? She was relieved, having imagined all sorts of awful scenarios since yesterday evening.

What could it be that had changed her? Her first thought was a memory: how, about two weeks ago, on the third or fourth night Johnny came to her room, her period had started. She’d been worried about what he’d think, what he’d say, when he smelled it on her. She’d felt embarrassed, it was just so… biological, like her body was nothing but a messy soft machine. He hadn’t acted any different than usual, of course, and she realized he must smell it all the time on women and girls. It was as common as spit and she was being stupid thinking there was any shame in it.

Remembering this, she suddenly realized what it was that was happening:

“I’m ovulating!” she cried.

“You’re what?” the voice from the window asked.

“Ovulating! Or I ovulated yesterday, which means I’m fertile for about 24 hours! And you can smell that! It’s kind of amazing, don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” he said doubtfully, “but…”

Johnny hadn’t been to school, and had never before heard the word ‘ovulating’, so Faye explained to him the process of her eggs (which a woman was born with, she said, with about a million!) being released from her ovaries on a monthly basis, and how it moves down one of the fallopian tubes, waiting to be fertilized. She had learned about this at the beginning of the school year, and it was all still clear in her mind. It had interested her very much at the time. Talking about it now, it kind of, weirdly enough, got her excited. It wasn’t very sexy talk, but explaining it to her love, while it was so very factually all happening inside her, made her feel very much like a woman.

She would be seventeen in a couple of months, still a girl, they said. But here and now she realized she was as much a woman, in all the ways that mattered, as any other woman. She generally thought of herself as a girl, a kid, because she was treated as a kid by everyone: still in school, living at home, being grounded… But she wasn’t a girl. At this moment nature told her she was a woman. Society had convinced her she was a girl, but what was society, anyway? Society changed all the time—hadn’t her mother recently explained that? Her aunties had known better, living on their own in New York at fourteen and fifteen. Had they been kids? Why, she wondered, would she still let anybody—parents, society, whoever—tell her what she should and what she shouldn’t do?

“Why don’t you come back in?” she said calmly, composed, mature.

“Do what?” asked the incredulous voice outside.

“Why not?” she said. “My parents already think we’ve been having sex anyway…”

“They what?!”

“…To hell with society, Johnny. What we’re feeling is natural. Why fight nature?”

“Are you sure?”

“Buster, get in here!” she laughed.

His head appeared in the window, rather comically. His eyes still big, but they had softened.

He took her in his arms, and she took him in her arms. There were no words. At no point did Faye even think about the possibility of Pearly or Johnny’s mother walking in. There was no world outside, no shack past Johnny’s bed, there was only she and he.

He buried his face in her neck and inhaled deeply. She too could smell him, in her human way, and it smelled right. They kissed and she hugged his soft furry back, felt his hairless chest against her bare breasts, his bare stomach against hers. She took hold of his fluffy tail, and ran it through her hands—he pulled back to look her in the eye, and smiled at her. She smiled back, as if they were sharing an inside joke. Then they kissed again, languidly, and she felt his warm and moist penis against her belly. She twisted her body to look at it, and took it gently in her hand. It hadn’t been visible when he had jumped out of bed, it only appeared when aroused. It wasn’t covered with skin like a human penis and was bright pink and smooth and shiny, like it was made out of candy, it was so pretty.

“Do you want me to…” he whispered.

“Let me,” she said, and—quite smoothly for someone who had only ever read about it—she took the warm and slippery penis, shifted her hips, and guided him in.