The Silent Tutsi

Gabrielle appeared to be fascinated by Linda's tee-shirts and not just by what was underneath. On those occasions when Gabrielle's gaze rested on her chest, which seemed to be more frequent now, they lingered over the printed words. Sometimes they were simply declamatory like 'Glastonbury Festival' or 'University of East Anglia'. Sometimes they had text that described a product or carried a humorous message. Linda had acquired her tee-shirts from many different sources. Most often she was given them, but sometimes she bought one at a concert or on holiday. There was no consistent theme amongst them, unless it was the fact she preferred ones that revealed a fair amount of midriff.

It was a particularly hot day when Gabrielle pulled at the seam of the tee-shirt Linda was wearing and stroked a finger over it. She gazed up at her teacher, who wasn't sure she knew what to do, and her face expressed the promise of an inquisitive smile.

"Do you want to borrow one of my tee-shirts?" asked Linda, thinking this was probably the safest question to ask.

Astonishingly, Gabrielle nodded with a smile that wasn't exactly broad but lasted an uncharacteristically long time.

Linda was sure she shouldn't just take off her tee-shirt and give it to Gabrielle. After all, she had nothing underneath. But her bedroom was just next door.

"Come on," she said. "Come and choose a couple to borrow."

Gabrielle was escorted into Linda's bedroom for the first time. Linda pulled out her collection of tee-shirts from a drawer and laid them on the bed.

"Take whichever ones you fancy."

Gabrielle spent a long time standing by the bed looking at the tee-shirts. She didn't touch them. She didn't lean forward. She just stood there in her blouse and skirt, with her hands clasped in front of her. Then, with no warning, she undid her blouse and slipped it off to reveal that she also wore no bra under her top, although so thick was the linen it upheld her modesty rather better than did Linda's tee-shirts.

The time it took for Gabrielle to pick up one of Linda's tee-shirts—one celebrating Dumbleford's Annual May Fair—and to slip it on over her shoulders was probably rather less than a minute, but it etched itself into Linda's memory as much longer. Gabrielle was very slender and the scar on her left arm was accompanied by a similar scar on the left side of her chest below her ribs. And the bared breasts, which Linda later studied over and over again in her memory, were full—not so much spherical but tipped by broad puffy areolae a lighter colour than the rest of her skin. The tee-shirt hid her breasts, but not her slender waist and slightly protruding navel.

The truncated tee-shirt looked rather odd in contrast to the prim skirt. It didn't quite match. "Do you want to borrow one of my pairs of shorts?" asked Linda, who wasn't absolutely sure that her English lessons had yet covered this item of clothing and tweaked her own to indicate what she meant.

Gabrielle nodded and with no ceremony undid her skirt and stepped out of it. And here was a surprise that Linda most definitely didn't expect. The girl was wearing no knickers under her skirt. Not wearing a bra was one thing. Linda wasn't wearing one either. But no knickers! Then she stood with her hands over her crotch while Linda with a blush pulled some shorts out of a drawer. Gabrielle chose a blue pair and while she picked them up and pulled them on, Linda with embarrassment studied her slender thighs and the dark bush of black curly hair that obscured her vulva.

It was this memory and of Gabrielle's breasts that Linda rehearsed in her mind and to which she found herself masturbating in bed that night. It was a guilty masturbation, even more so than usual. She didn't want to make a noise that might alert the Duquesne family to what she was doing and she also hoped that no one might guess what it was that excited her.

However, someone else in the house was rather less careful than she in hiding her nocturnal habits. The sounds of the rustle of sheets, a rhythmic pumping of the bedstead against the wall and what sounded like small gasps were coming from Gabrielle's room. This astonished Linda, not only because it was the first time she'd heard any utterance from Gabrielle's mouth, but also because it told her two things she'd never really considered before. One was that the young black girl was also someone who might have sexual urges. And the other was that the short ceremony of changing clothes might have aroused her as much as it had Linda—though clearly not so much from what she saw but from what she exhibited.

Laurent and Pauline Duquesne were also very surprised when Gabrielle appeared at the dinner table in Linda's clothes, though they made no comment while she sat there. After Gabrielle left, Pauline smiled at Linda.

"We're happy to see Gabrielle coming out of her shell," she said in French. "However, I don't think your clothes are a very good fit for her. The tee-shirt and shorts are rather loose. Next time I'm in the shops I must get some clothes that are more her size."

Linda nodded. She knew there was a difference in their sizes, which meant that Gabrielle looked almost ridiculous in a tee-shirt that was somewhat baggy and shorts that only stayed up because she pulled her belt tight, but even so slipped down enough for Linda to see the crack of Gabrielle's buttocks whenever she leaned forward. But if Gabrielle felt embarrassed by the poor fit, she didn't show it. Although she let a smile pass her face more often than before, she still had a very earnest expression in repose that was somewhat at odds with a tee-shirt celebrating Theakston's Special Bitter and a pair of shorts that showed off most of her hips.

The tutorials Linda conducted with Gabrielle now had a very peculiar flavour to them. How long could this tangible state of tension last? When Linda leaned forward to show her student the illustrations in the English language books that accompanied the text, Gabrielle leaned forward too, so that their bare arms pressed against each other. When Gabrielle scribbled her written answers to the exercises, Linda sat back and studied the black girl's legs, thighs, shoulders and, most of all, the arch of her bent-over neck. She both hoped that Gabrielle didn't notice the intensity of her gaze and also that she did and understood, perhaps better than Linda did herself, what her scrutiny signified. And when Linda read aloud from the text about Malcolm's adventures in London, Kevin's shopping expeditions or Susan's interest in cooking, she was now sure that Gabrielle's gaze wasn't really inscrutable at all.

And after these lessons, there was an awkwardness about closing the proceedings that were not at all helped by Gabrielle's silence, filled in with rather too many words by Linda's account of what the lesson was meant to achieve and what the next one would be about. And each night Linda found it difficult to get to sleep as her mind whirred with thoughts of Gabrielle, while she could hear the bed sheets rustle and the mattress shudder in the adjacent bedroom.

It was fortunate indeed that Laurent, Pauline and their two children were more often out of the house than indoors when the tension finally broke. The way it happened wasn't totally an accident, of course, but neither Gabrielle nor Linda knew how else the barrier could be broken without some semblance of happenchance.

Linda was sitting next to Gabrielle, their thighs touching, and Gabrielle now wearing one of the tee-shirts Pauline had bought her that fit rather better than any of Linda's although it showed rather less of her midriff. Although she had a choice of new shorts as well, she had decided to wear one of Linda's that slipped provocatively down over her hips.

Linda glanced at the shorts that had fallen low enough for her to see the upper reaches of Gabrielle's pubic hairs emerging from under the waistband.

"You really must tighten the belt more," said Linda, putting her hands around Gabrielle's waist to pull the belt together. Gabrielle stood up to let Linda do the task with more ease and as she did so, she deliberately undid the belt so that the oversize shorts dropped down to her ankles. As Linda suspected was usual for her, she wore no knickers underneath.

For a moment, the two girls were frozen as if in a tableau. Gabrielle standing with just a tee-shirt celebrating a Picardy summer fete and a pair of shorts bunched about her ankles. Linda crouched beside her with her arms around the girl's totally bare hips and felt the black girl's flesh burning on her fingers. She was reluctant to break the impasse, but eventually did so, frightened that the moment would pass forever, by kissing Gabrielle tenderly on her taut stomach.

And that brief moment of physical contact became rather longer and more intense as Gabrielle impulsively tugged off her tee-shirt so that she was totally naked and pulled Linda up so that they were face-to-face. For a few seconds, the two girls faced one another, one black and naked, the other white and not naked. And then with a strangled gasp they pushed their faces, mouths and bodies together in a passionate, carnal embrace. And this embrace became more urgent and more physical, as Linda divested herself of her clothes as rapidly as she could. Their two bodies staggered backwards and clumsily, like an uncoordinated quadruped, and collapsed lengthwise, both now naked, onto Gabrielle's bed that, in all these weeks, had been there unnoticed, not considered, but at last inviting and inevitable.

Linda was not totally innocent, but her fumblings in the past had always been with boys and beyond a cursory probing of the genitals had not really lingered long in the more intimate territory she would later be intent on exploring to the full with Gabrielle. There was so much to explore. The long thin fingers. The slightly small ears. The long arching neck. Those beautiful breasts that were so unlike her own which, in turn, so evidently fascinated Gabrielle. Although their mutual groping was intimate, passionate and sensual, there was a further degree of sexual license that Linda was reluctant to initiate. As so too was Gabrielle—although she nibbled and licked her nipples with such ferocity and desire that Linda wasn't certain that they might not exercise some appeal other than the obviously sexual.

There was so much else to get to know without venturing into the region between the legs that she was content to alternate her kisses and cuddles from the mouth to the body and back again. It was when the two met mouth to mouth that she could be most certain that Gabrielle's passion and desire equalled her own. This in itself was a novel experience and not one she'd experienced during her previous gropings at university or school. On those occasions she was uncertain whether the boys' lust focused on Linda as a person or just as the nearest available woman.

The passion that was so furious to start with began to ease, and the two girls stretched out languidly on the bed together as they took stock of their abruptly changed relationship. They were panting heavily, perhaps less with exhaustion than with excitement. Linda gazed lovingly at Gabrielle and was delighted to see that her lover's face had not settled into a state of serious impassivity. Instead, like Linda's, it was flushed with excitement and pasted with perspiration. Most of all, she sported a huge smile that did not vanish after only the briefest glimpse.

"Oh, I love you!" said Linda with fondness, her voice somehow catching in her throat. "I love you, Gabrielle." Then, to ensure that the message was not lost in translation, she said: "Je t'aime. Je t'aime."

Words didn't seem enough, but clearly their lovemaking demanded something more. Linda had seen a few pornographic images on the internet and was sure she had a vague idea of what should happen next. However, she had on hand none of the kit of sexual aids that lesbian porn stars always had available however much they appeared to be taken by surprise, but she knew the general area where she should go.

Linda slid down to Gabrielle's thighs, lifted them up and gazed at her huge white eyes questioningly.

"Shall I?" she asked.

Gabrielle nodded.

Linda then parted the black bush of pubic hair that obscured Gabrielle's vulva, hunched forward and pushed her tongue onto the long, thankfully uncircumcised, clitoris. She knew what a vagina looked like. After all, she'd explored her own often enough. But it was curious how different Gabrielle's was to any she'd seen before. And even more peculiar still, she discovered when she parted it slightly to reveal the strangely pink interior.

It was while she was engrossed in the business of chewing and munching Gabrielle's crotch that Linda heard a voice. At first she thought it was Gabrielle's grunts and pants, which were occasionally articulated in her passion but they would have no diction or syntax. Then she realised that these were words. An entire phrase.

Linda lifted up her head and body by her shoulders and looked directly into Gabrielle's face. She was smiling. And more than that, not just smiling, she was saying something. The first words since her horrific trauma in Rwanda all those years ago.

And what were these words?

They were exactly what Linda most wanted to hear.

"Je t'aime. Je t'aime."