There are times I think I am in heaven. I sit in the studio where I write my children's books and look out across the fields and into the valley below, down the hill between the majestic trees, to the local village nestling among the fields. I can see the square tower of the church clearly, with its flag of St George fluttering and the tiled and thatched roofs of the old houses gleaming in the sunlight. Then I look across from this idyllic scene to Pixie and I feel even better.
She might even glance up from the illustration she is working and smile back at me, but generally Pixie and I work on our respective projects in a companionable silence. Every so often I might get up and go and see what Pixie is drawing - she is so much better at art than I ever was - and she may ask what I am writing. But we respect each other's space, even when I am writing the book that she is illustrating for me. Pixie and I are happy the way we are and I don't think I could ask for anything more from life.
Pixie isn't her name, of course. Yes, I tell her she has an elfin face and a lithe, slight body that looks several years younger than she is but she accepts that is my name for her. Just as I accept she calls me 'wifey' which is probably a clever play on my first names of Wendy Faye, but it sums up our relationship. I am her wife in every way you can imagine and possibly some you can't, but then we have developed and changed and grown a lot in our 15 years together.
We have had the space and the time to become what we are, and in that we have been fortunate. Pixie received a large inheritance a dozen years ago and we were able to buy this cottage in the rolling Cotswold hills and set up our lives for me to be a writer and her to be an artist. With it too we bought the biggest bed with satin sheets and the largest double-size bath we could find. There are times I think our world in these solid walls comprises the studio where we both work, the bedroom where we spend many happy hours making love and splashing in the bath together. Sometimes I think we are more like children than they would be.
It's hard to think that Pixie and I only came together because of a broken vase years ago, when I was an excitable 14 year old girl at school. I can recall the time perfectly because, as I always believe, the most important parts of our lives - the moments that transport us - are etched into our memories. That was how it was with Pixie and me. I don't know what she recalls of it but I know how much it all meant to me.
The vase in question was in one of the art lessons, and it was broken because, well... Let's just say people are people and things happen unexpectedly but perhaps with a greater purpose behind it.
I had started an affair with a classmate at a time when I barely understood my feelings. Lily was a taller and more athletic girl than me and it may well be that was why I had been attracted to her. I saw her running once and her long flashing legs seemed to me the thing I wanted wrapped tightly round me. I had, unwilling to reveal my sexual preferences as most girls are in school where revealing your sapphic inclinations can destroy you, kept my desire for her quiet and all I could do was bring myself to orgasm each night thinking of her as I lay alone in bed.
But life can do some strange things. My vase, crafted in one of Miss Sixsmith's art lesson, became the focal point of a change in my life that was to propel me to real happiness. Miss Sixsmith was barely old enough to be our teacher, but she was a trainee and enthusiastic about art in all its shapes and hues. We girls liked her as much as any schoolgirl can like their teachers, enough at least to bestow on her the nickname 'Sexsmith' because she had long blonde hair and large dark eyes and reminded one of us at least of some obscure French movie star whose contribution to the world of cinema was, we gathered, being fucked left, right and centre on screen in an exotic and explicit movie. So Sexsmith took us for art and she would choose the still life objects that we would draw, though in my case poorly.
Miss Sixsmith wasn't the focus of my ardour, even if she flattered me by choosing the one thing I had made of any quality in her lesson: a vase inscribed, secretly using the tip of a compass, with my initials and Lily's too. I only had eyes for Lily who I imagined could run for hours and I would fantasise that she could make love for hours too. In this I was almost right: Lily was an enthusiastic lesbian lover.
I found this out because Lily must have detected my yearning for her, or she recognised the look in my eyes as I stared at her which I probably did far too often for my own good. I had no idea she was attracted to girls as there was no rumour or hint about her sexuality, but she was every bit like me. Out of the blue at the end of March that year she cornered me on a corridor and kissed me, and then she invited me to stay with her at her parents' home over the Easter holiday. I was taken aback by both things but I readily accepted both her lips and the offer. Of more sex away from everyone else. I thought my heart would explode when our lips met and Lily whispered to me how much she fancied me. I think my legs would have given way if she hadn't held me close to her as she kissed me.
When you have done nothing but dream for months of intimacy and then you get to finally kiss the object of your dream, it's easy to think that life couldn't get any better. But it could.
As for the school vacation, my family wanted to go away and so they had no problem with me staying with Lily and her mother and father in a large house while they explored foreign bars and beaches. Lily's family home was a house large enough for her and me to disappear from sight, and in secret places and little used rooms we made love. Yes, she did wrap her legs round me and it was as every bit as good as I imagined in the throes of cumming. She could crush me with her long legs round my waist and push her tongue in my mouth as she did so and breathlessly I fell in love with her even more deeply than I thought possible.
For ten days we made passionate, frenzied love as only two hopelessly infatuated young teens can. We explored each other's bodies, we rained kisses on each other from every angle and I felt the girl's strength take me over. I surrendered to her willingly.
We had to be careful back at school of course, and though there were the odd sneaked kisses and touches it could never match the level of fun we had at her family home. I accepted that with as much grace as I could, but I told myself the longer summer vacation was gradually creeping nearer and we would then be able to really get down to having fun. Six weeks of it, I was sure. Six weeks when I would be crushed and kissed and played with and I would lick her and tongue her slit and whatever else Lily wanted me to do.
I admit that when we resumed school though not only were our chances for sex greatly limited but Lily seemed often, when I could get her alone, somewhat distant. This, however, was probably wise because the last thing either of us needed was to be the target of schoolgirl nastiness that was probably bound to spill out to our families.
And then my vase broke.
I am not sure why it happened, but it did. Sexsmith had chosen my one piece of art as the centrepiece of a still-life drawing session complete with flowers in it and there my creation sat on a stool in the middle of a ring of us unappreciative schoolgirls, all of us carefully trying to draw its slightly uneven but still elegant shape. I could even see where I had scratched in my initials and Lily's, and prayed that no else realised what the seemingly random marks really meant.
For a reason I will never know the lesson wasn't going well for Lily. Though she was an athlete primarily I always figured she was better at art than I was, and I was surprised when she stood up and said she had had enough of this. I have no idea what came over her, but something made her angry. Lily threw her drawing board down in a display of unexpected petulance but it bounced into the stool and my lovely, lovingly inscribed vase rolled off it and fell to the floor with a crash.
My one piece of art - my heart, if you like - lay, broken with its flowers scattered, and with it for a reason I can never explain something broke in me.
The lesson was as good as over and Sexsmith annoyed, as the teacher had every right to be. I picked up the pieces of the vase without being told as everyone filed out. With my head down I was crying as I collected the pieces, because this was something I had hoped to give to Lily one day as a token of my love for her. She had irrationally destroyed the only thing I thought I could give her.
Sexsmith saw my tears and seemed to understand. The class had left and as I picked up the shattered vase in the now quiet classroom she gently put her hand on mine and said not to worry. She looked at me in a way I had never seen anyone look at me before. "I understand," she said quietly. "I know what it meant to you. I know about you and Lily, but she isn't right for you."
My broken vase went in the waste basket and Sexsmith had the chance to talk to me. We were together, alone, and she gave me comfort. Yes, she understood what I was, what I felt, seen how I'd looked at Lily and even what the seemingly chaotic engraving of mine really meant. She also told me that she had seen Lily with another girl and suddenly I began to see why there was a gap between Lily and me. A good-looking girl by the name of Martina Lester had come between Lily and me, and I saw it clearly for the first time how close they had been lately, how much they laughed together. "Don't worry. Everything can be made whole," the young woman said to me, her breath on my cheek because we attending close and the scent of her lovely body in my nose, "and anyway I can read you like a book, Wendy Faye." She leaned in and kissed me softly, and something began to heal my heart.
Then she kissed the last of my tears away.
It may not surprise you that Sexsmith and I became lovers. I had a better summer than I could ever had with Lily because Phillipa Sixsmith was a better lover. Where Lily had been eager and demanding but careless for my feelings, Phillipa taught me the value of patience and gentleness and how to make us both happy simultaneously. Although only seven years older than me she was the expert lover I needed, soft and caring and passionate and thrilling. There was no tension or distance between us, nothing to break because we were entwined as one.
Phillipa and I lived together when I left school and she stopped teaching with the inheritance. She had her hair cut short and still looks incredibly young and I love her more than anything every day. I happily regard myself as her wife and I want to please her all the time.
The broken vase, by the way, was fished out of the waste basket by Phillipa after our little talk and she carefully glued together. It now sits in pride of place on the windowsill of our shared studio overlooking the rolling Cotswold landscape and if I look at it in a certain way I think the immature engraving on it really reads 'Pixie.' I am sure I can see a heart in there, too.
Actually, I know there is a heart in there, the way the glue makes the shape beautifully.
The End