"She's an orgasm addict/ She's always at it."
-- misheard song lyrics by the Buzzcocks
Mariam was going to cum. Dante could tell this, even from the privacy of his own bedroom, since the walls were patch-board thin and the young woman had the unfortunate habit of talking to herself when alone.
"I'm so dirty. I'm so very-- very-- dirty."
Her voice was the sort certain women spend a life trying to cultivate: a twee, high-pitched, baby doll vox. Except Mariam wasn't putting on an act, that was just how she sounded. Dante would listen for a while each night and then roll over and bury his head under a pillow, trying to drown out her babbling.
"Oohh dear, I am making a mess all over the bed."
It was the bed springs laboriously squeaking that filled Dante's head with feelings he had a hard time controlling. Anyone could tell by the sounds what she was doing in there. At first Dante tried to rationalize it, everyone else in the free world had these sorts of urges, why act shocked when his Mariam seemed to want to do this too? Shocked wasn't the right word, though. He just wished she would channel her impulses into something more ... constructive.
Partly it was that he was getting tired of cleaning up her messes. Mariam never exaggerated. If she announced to the world that she had just messed up the bed or was wet or felt hot it was simply because she had, was and did. Dante didn't think she had the cognitive abilities in her to exaggerated, even if her life depended on it. Some of us are just like that.
"I am a bad-- bad-- girl."
That was the other thing that made this whole endeavor on her part somewhat squalid and wrong: Mariam was different, wasn't she? Every morning after she awoke Dante would bundle the sheets up and take them down to the washing machine. On sunny days the backyard would be filled with bleached bed linen, each with its own cryptic defiled stain he couldn't scrub out, fluttering on the clothesline. Dante had been forced to put plastic incontinence pads down to protect the mattress for even on the very first night she slept over she somehow managed to soak through every bed sheet and blanket, leaving a kidney-shaped stain that just wouldn't come out.
And because she wasn't like other girls it made all his emotions for her highly problematic. Why he was sexually attracted to her, he couldn't exactly tell. He definitely knew shouldn't be. If she had been elderly and debilitated then it would have been easy. He was a professional, he had worked his way through college as a nursing assistant on the dementia ward of a retirement home. He had taken care of his share of grandmothers, the old babushkas, washed and fed them, changed their diapers and not once did he entertain the sort of thoughts Mariam awoke in him. What made matters worse was that while Dante never saw himself as her legal guardian, per se, he couldn't separate the fact that he was responsible for her.
That, he knew, was what made this all sick and wrong.
But the squeaking bed springs, the sounds – audible even through the wall – of her fingers hard at work, the tell-tale smears every morning, the cries of "Oohh dear! Oohh dear!" How could anyone not be affected by all this? Dante was. His cock was. He sighed. He needed to stop this before things got out of hand. All it would take would be one moment of weakness on his part and then ... he shook his head. Then he would be in trouble.
Dante looked at the bedside clock: 1:23 in the morning. Gritting his teeth he opened his bedroom door and stepped out into the hall.
Mariam's door was ajar. It would never occur to her to get out of bed and close it. Privacy wasn't something Mariam had been taught. If Dante remembered to pull it shut after tucking her in it stayed shut. She had been known to get out of bed from time to time but usually because something had caught her attention and she wanted to investigate. Once he found her crouched in the bedroom's corner, inquisitively playing with the electric wall socket. He didn't think she could seriously hurt herself, but who really knew? He took her by the hand and led her back to bed. She followed happily, that silly look of hers all over her face.
Dante paused before knocking. He was horny. He knew he was horny and that would make everything so much more difficult. He had yet to cross that line, though he had been fantasizing about it for a while. "What am I about to do?" he thought to himself. He could hear the bed see-sawing under her weight, her short high-pitched cries, that scupping sound that reminded him of when you wade through the ooze in the bottom of a dry dock. Dante drew a deep breath and then knocked on the door.
There wasn't an immediate response. The bed springs still squeaked away. Apparently she hadn't heard him. He knocked a second time, then a third, before he heard movement. Mariam appeared, a bit flushed and out of breath. Her pupils were dilated and the nightgown he had dressed her in earlier now had betrayal pleasure stains visible everywhere her hands had been. Her nipples poked out through the fabric and Dante found he had been staring and checked himself.
"Er, sorry to interrupt," he began, and then, suddenly, he was only partially sorry. That was the problem, wasn't it? She was gorgeous. Even standing in the doorway in somebody else's nightgown he could feel his heart flutter and his cock bloat and get bigger and bigger in his boxers. Mariam's hair hung down a bit disheveled with a sheen of perspiration dotting her forehead. He glanced down at her fingertips. They were, indeed, wet and sticky.
"Oohh, it's okay," she blearily smiled, the way she did any time of the day or night when she saw him.
"Did I interrupt you in the middle of something?" Dante asked.
It was then the miraculous happened: her smile faltered. This amazed Dante, checking his libido in mid-throb. Mariam was never sad. In all the time he had known her she seemed as innocent and care-free and oblivious to the evils of the world as any of the Alzheimer's patients he once cared for. It was one of the reasons he put up with her endless nocturnal immersions. A look of infinite sadness crossed her deep brown eyes and suddenly, as absurd as it was, Dante knew he loved her and would do anything for her. He'd go to hell and back if she asked it of him.
