Acquired Tastes Read Free

dressing, but she had insisted Alicia order from the dessert trolley. After all, Alicia never seemed bothered about the way she looked and it showed. She was beginning to look positively middle-aged thought Vanessa as she caught sight of her own reflection in a mirror opposite. She smiled. No one could possibly believe that she was thirty-six and nearly a year older than Alicia. She looked at least ten years younger.
    Alicia closed her eyes as she savoured a spoonful of cheesecake. It was really rather good. She swallowed and looked across at her friend. 'Gosh, your world seems such an awfully long way from my little concerns over finishing research papers and preparing tutorials, although Fergus says that I am much too conscientious and work far too hard.' A hint of colour came into her cheeks.
    'Fergus?' Vanessa looked away from the mirror; she could scent sex at twenty paces. 'Who's Fergus?'
    'Dr Fergus Archibald,' Alicia said proudly, 'is a lecturer in the Psychology Department at Heartlands University. He should have been departmental head, but there are certain people …' she lowered her voice and looked around as though 'they' might be hiding somewhere in the restaurant, 'who are jealous of his brilliant mind.'
    Vanessa waved a hand dismissively at what were, to her, matters of little import. 'Are you and him …?'
    The unspoken word trailed in the air like a blazing comet.
    'Vanessa,' Alicia protested, flushing deep red.
    'Well, don't you think it's about time you got laid? They don't give prizes for saving it, you know, and Prince Charmings are at the top of the endangered species list. So,' demanded Vanessa scooping another helping of cream, 'is this Fergus person the one …?'
    Alicia scooped up another spoonful of cheesecake. It was double chocolate cheesecake and well worth its name. 'It's a bit too early to say. I've only known him two terms.'
    'And you haven't been to bed with him! Is he queer or something? You do have a way of picking them, Alicia.'
    Vanessa's reference to an earlier disastrous crush that she had formed on a fellow scholar of dubious sexuality, caused Alicia to bridle.
    'Fergus is very masculine,' she burst out. It was a rare act of defiance and quickly recanted. She lowered her eyes, 'It's not him, it's me. I'm not like you, Vanessa. You've always been so confident about, well… men and things.'
    By 'things', Alicia meant sex. Something Vanessa had been aware of from the moment her mother had dressed her in pink satin and lace, strapped her plump little toddler's feet into silver patent leather shoes and urged her to smile and 'ask daddy nicely'.
    Vanessa had needed little further bidding and quickly learned that daddy wasn't the only male who, for the price of a smile or a girlish kiss, would press whatever it was she wanted into her outstretched hands. Being sent to St Aloysius had temporarily denied her the requisite males on whom to try out her rapidly maturing charms, but Vanessa had soon found that girlish adoration could be quite as heady.
    In the hothouse atmosphere of a girls' boarding school, matters bodily and sexual counted more than academic diligence, which was just as well for Vanessa. For while she was a walking encyclopaedia on the former, she would have come near the bottom on the latter if not for Alicia's willingness to 'help' her with her homework and sit next to her during exams.
    While the rest of the Upper Fourth greeted the changes wrought on their bodies by the sudden rush of hormones like an ancient Greek chorus, plucking helplessly at the unwelcome flesh on their thighs, keening at the eruption of pimples, and hiding their faces with shame as they were forced to deal monthly with a part of their bodies that hitherto they had been taught to pretend didn't exist, Vanessa watched, untouched by angst as her olive-toned skin remained unfairly clear, and her body grew long and sleek. And with the confidence born of having started her periods first, Vanessa confidently