Alone in her bed now, Simone lay there re-living the events of the night before.  Expressionless but becoming increasingly aware of the primary and all too familiar feeling of guilt as fleeting images flashed through her mind. 'Annabelle.'   'My back against the wall… her hands all over me… her mouth open to mine.'  Her body jerked responsively, remembering too.  'Her face… looking up at me as she knelt in front of me, kissing my stomach…my breasts.'  She breathed in deeply and closed her eyes.  'Stop Simone.'  She commanded herself as she sat bolt upright in her bed.  'You can't let yourself  re-live it, even in your thoughts, because you never should have lived it in the first place.'

Having now done an internal about face she began, in earnest, the task of berating herself for letting Annabelle touch her that way, for allowing herself to touch Annabelle that way.  'This is all my fault.'  'Why did I Kiss her?' 'Why did I bring her back to my room?'   'How did I let this happen?'  Not really answering her own questions, because she didn't completely know the answers to some of them herself and because the return of rational thought told her, in no uncertain terms, that there was no good answer.  Nothing would make what happened acceptable.  What had been allowed in the night, in the heat of passion, must be denied, in abject clarity, this morning and it would never be easily explained away.  'There is no justifying this.' Simone flatly stated to herself.

Extending her upturned hands in front of her, Simone looked on them as she considered how only hours ago they had let go of sanity and grabbed hold of Annabelle — gripping Annabelle's thigh and back as waves of indescribable pleasure washed over her body.  'Oh my … what was I thinking?'  She asked herself rhetorically, before mocking herself.  'Huh, obviously I wasn't really thinking at all.'  Now she could only plant her head in those guilty hands as she tried to make sense of the 'how' and 'why' of her departure from reason already knowing that sense was conspicuously absent from the events of last night.

'How did things get so out of hand?'  She asked herself, wondering if she could pinpoint the moment when she had abandoned all reason.  At what point had she let go of her rational senses, so completely, that in her mind it became o.k., even for a moment, for her to make love to one of her students.  Disgusted by the very words, she made herself say them again.  'One of your students…. God, how could you Simone?'   'What have you allowed yourself to do….. to become…. what have you done… with her…to her?'  As Simone began to get her arms around the potential fallout of her actions — the tragic, exponential consequences of one singular act that was at once so beautiful and so detrimental, she began to cry.