Jess had just celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday and felt about as old and used up as a woman her age could fee. She was tired and worn out and frustrated and most of all saddened as she stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was much thinner than it had been in her twenties. Her laugh lines were more pronounced. Her breasts were not as full and perky as they had once been, and her eyes crinkled. Where had the time gone? It seemed that her body had gotten older while her mind was stuck in adolescence.

Jess slipped in to her nightgown then clicked the light off and slid into her single bed. The night was warm and she slept with the window open. She could hear the neighbors' television from the apartment next door. She had Jeffrey on her mind.

Jeffrey was the new IT guy at the high school Jess taught at -- a kid, really. He was only 23, and barely that. But he flirted with her relentlessly. He was a really nice guy so Jess flirted back when no students were around, initially believing they were just teasing.

It was behind the safety of an instant messenger on her home computer, that Jess realized he wasn't teasing.

"I'd love to let you teach me a few things," Jeffrey wrote, including a winking smiley. Jess laughed and told him he should behave.

"I mean it," he continued. "I have a fantasy about being with an older woman. And what guy doesn't fantasize about banging a teacher? And you're hot."

Jess blushed. "There are places in this country where I'd be old enough to be your mother."

"Yes, but you're not my mother," he reminded her.

It was nice to be flirted with and Jess found herself warming to this guy with all his barely 23 confidence.

"Girls my age haven't let go of the bull shit, yet," he told her. "I want a woman who knows how to be fucked without crying about her childhood afterward."

Good lord, has he come to the wrong place, Jess thought to herself. She was quite possibly the most sexually repressed person on the planet.

It wasn't that she didn't like sex. She loved it. But her desires were specific and she couldn't bring herself to give voice to them. Lovers would ask her what she wanted, but she was too embarrassed or shy or who knows what to tell them. As a result, they tended to treat her with kid gloves, afraid of offending her or hurting her. This was exactly the opposite of what Jess desired most.

Jess longed to be manhandled. Nothing was more erotic to her than being held down by a lover, knowing she was at his mercy. She loved to feel teeth on her skin and to feel her hair being pulled. She loved to be spanked.

And it was the comfort of hiding in her room with nothing but her computer monitor that allowed her to reveal these things to Jeffrey, despite her better judgment.

Jeffrey had amazing insight for his age. "I think you're afraid to tell your lovers these things because the element of control is what is most erotic to you," he told her. "You want to relinquish control to someone else, yet telling him to do those things defeats that purpose. You are still in control."

Jess wasn't certain that was the case, but the amount of thought and logic impressed her.