I had been fortunate. My childhood had, partly through the turmoil of the times, partly through parental ‘neglect’, not significantly inhibited my natural sexual development. It was followed by a not particularly adventurous but by fortunate circumstances blessed youth. During it, sexual encounters with sensually intelligent, mature women taught me much about them and, most importantly, myself. It completed my liberation from prissy inhibition without rendering me a libertine. I married a woman I loved, and that loved me. We were sexually compatible and fulfilled until our marriage became too strained to last for other reasons. So, I had my first extramarital sexual relationship as late as in the tenth year of my marriage. And I was fortunate again.

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Although my full-time job at University was in a different field, I had taken on teaching German for the Council of Adult Education at one of Melbourne’s other Colleges. It involved one evening class of three hours per week. The pay was poor, but I enjoyed being once more involved in language teaching, especially with self-motivated adults in an open-ended, flexible program. I had done it now for three years.

This year’s group was bright and enthusiastic, consisting of young to middle-aged women. Four of them were English speakers with German husbands. All of them were easily motivated to meet the challenge of learning as quickly and as much as possible in one year.

I told them, therefore, that many of them could reach a Pass in what was the University-entrance standard for German. It was an ambitious goal, but if they decided to aim for it, I would do my best to take them there. After a lot of questions and a lively debate, the group decided to go for it.

Our group quickly clicked into a companionship beyond the limits of our weekly meetings. Some women formed close friendships. These were strengthened by exchanging invitations to dinner parties and shared activities that included their partners and children. Without going into detail, I believe that the coursework contributed much to this bonding by providing not only a shared aim but a genuinely shared interest.

It was fortunate that the German Matriculation examination was not content-specific in either its written or oral component. There were no prescribed prose texts or poetry. Therefore, for my mature group, I could choose more challenging texts to study than the schools selected. For prose texts, we read short stories from post-war German writers. For poetry, I avoided the lulling comfort of the Romantics and introduced them to poets like Rilke and Brecht.

Helen was one of the liveliest and most enthusiastic participants in the group. She was in her early forties, intelligent, attractive, English-born, married to a German. She had given for some in our group one of the early dinner parties. Erika, my wife, and I were invited. Since then, we had met socially a few times more.

Whilst Helen was friendly, nothing in her behaviour with me suggested more. She was not a flirt.

One evening after class, the group had already left, and I had to clear away a few things in the Language Laboratory; I met Helen in the corridor. She had forgotten her scarf and had to come back, she said. So, we left together, talking, walking out to the car park. She followed me to my car. I thought that hers happened to be parked near mine. As I searched for my keys, she grabbed my arm and said, “Ben, I have to talk to you.”

Helen looked flustered but determined. Suddenly I knew that we had not met by chance; she had waited for me. My heart was beating fast. I unlocked the passenger side door, opened it to put in my bag, and looked at her. Without a word, Helen slid past me into the seat. When I, slightly bewildered, got into the car and turned to her, she immediately shifted close. With a strangled voice, fronting me, she said: -

“I’m in trouble, and it’s your fault, Ben. I need to talk to you about something that worries me.”

I said nothing. I could not think of anything to say. Somehow, Helen’s head came to rest on my shoulder. Her breath played on my neck, giving me goose-bumps as she continued, almost whispering: -

“You shouldn’t give us women a poem like Rilke’s ‘Panther’. You should not have talked about it the way you did while you looked at me. How did you know how I felt?”

As she edged even closer, I put my arm around her and felt her shiver. When she turned and moved into what was becoming more than a hug, I suddenly realised what she meant and intended. I had, of course, not looked at her specifically when I talked to the group about Rilke’s caged Panther.

On the surface, the poem is a realistic description of a zoo animal. It is, however, foremost a brilliant metaphor. Through the sensuousness of the poem’s rhythm and choice of words, the Panther circling around itself behind bars becomes in all its vitality and beauty a picture of caged desires. I had not been too specific on the libido and its frustration with a teacher’s fatherly eye on my, possibly, partly innocent students.

With Helen, what I said had powerfully registered. It gave her an almost plausible justification for cornering me, demanding solution or amends: She, the Panther, her libido, had escaped from her cage!

I was flattered, excited, disturbed, but, ultimately, immediately willing to follow her lead. I reached across with my free hand to stroke over Helen’s hair. I did not need to press to bring her face closer to mine; our lips almost touched when I asked, “Are you a Panther that wants to break free? If Rilke and I helped, is that so bad?”

Helen’s arm locked around my neck. She pressed her forehead against mine to hoarsely whisper her answer. “Tonight, the Panther has escaped, and you alone are to blame. And she has hunted you down! Are you frightened, Ben? Shocked?”

We did not move into a tentative first kiss. Hellen’s opening lips took possession of mine, with our tongues immediately joined in a copulating dance. Hers was not an introductory, questioning kissing: Helen left nothing to doubt. Without interrupting our talking-in-tongues, Helen unbuttoned her coat. She blindly found my hand and put it on her breast. Not satisfied, while moaning in frustration, she pushed my searching fingers under her top and bra onto a heaving and shapely breast.

When, eventually, we broke out of our kiss, Helen burst into laughter. “Wow, that is a good start straight out of the cage. You see now what you have done! And you, a married man? Are you caged too?”

I decided to show her how free she made me by testing her mettle. I drew her closer, withdrew my hand from her breast and gripped the inside of Helen’s thigh as far up as her tight skirt allowed. Helen responded with an enthusiastic gasped “Yes”. Her lips opened, and her tongue lasciviously pushed deep into my mouth as her bottom lifted off the seat to allow her skirt to slide up. Her thighs spread, inviting me to do as I pleased and dared. When my hand closed over the temptingly hot, fleshy mound of her pussy, her groin arched and pressed its response.

It was time to demand from Helen a shamelessly direct answer to a shamelessly confronting question: -

“Are you going to do more with your freedom than way-lay me for a grope and kiss in the car? Like teenagers? You make me very curious, Helen. Do you fuck as hotly as you kiss? Do you? Do you want me to find out?”

Helen pushed and ground her pussy against my cupping hand and met my questions with a half-swallowed, excited cry of “Yes, Ben! Yes!, It’s what I badly want!” As she followed up with a flurry of feverish little kisses all over my face, Helen’s hand gripped my hurting, constricted cock.

Pressing her lips on my neck, Helen murmured: “God, I wish we could do it now! Yes, fuck and forget all! We will, won’t we? I’ll ring you, arrange it. But now, touch me! Really touch me! You’ll see how ready I am to be taken, out of the cage, in the wild! And you want me, Ben. I know, don’t you?”

Helen’s pelvis had lifted, and her crotch writhed and pressed and searched for my fingers. The panty’s cloth covering her sex was soaked. When my finger pushed it aside, Helen’s pussy’s lips opened, and two of my fingers slid into her cunt slippery heat. I looked at her face; her eyes closed, Helen’s lips were sensuously gaping in unbridled lust.

Helen’s mind had found foreplay all its own. This time it could only be my fingers deep in her pussy, but Helen rushed herself surprisingly quickly into a quite spectacular orgasm. Hiding nothing, she wanted it shared. Twisting and arching back, she screamed her ecstasy in my face.

As her convulsions subsided, laughter overcame her as she muttered a confession in my ear. “God, Ben, I needed that. But now I want more, much more and again and again from you. Does it scare you? Do I shock you?”

And her lips closed over mine, and her tongue rolled with mine in a sensual dance. It told me how much more Helen wanted and all she was burning to give.

Before we went our separate ways, Helen asked me for my phone number at work. I have always wondered how quickly women recover their usual self after sex, even after tempestuously climaxing. Helen had unhurriedly ordered her disarrayed clothing, and now, all lady-like kissed me farewell on the cheek.

Her car was parked near mine. I accompanied her. Sitting behind the steering wheel, Helen turned to me. Looking up through the opened window, she told me that Jurgen, her husband, was next week for five days in Bangkok.

Helen made it sound as if this had only now occurred to her. But she grinned, knowing she was naughty: Both, by planning her seduction at such a convenient time, and by letting me know she had done so. And I would have to wait for further, longed-for news of when and where we would meet.

The above happened on Thursday night. On Friday, I barely left my office, fearing I would miss her call. Then the weekend. She neither could nor would ring me at home.

Helen made me wait until Tuesday noon before she rang. Her voice sounded unfamiliar as if she was fighting for breath. It was sexy, charged with expectations left unsaid. “Jurgen left for Bangkok this morning. When can you come, come to my house?”

“Can it be Thursday? I have no classes on Thursday until our group at night.”

Helen fell silent, made me wait. I could hear her breathing. “Can you come in the morning? We can have all day to –“Helen paused, “get to know each other.”

When I said “Yes”, Helen suppressed a giggle. With a relieved sounding “See you then, I’ll be waiting.”, she hung up.