There are three earlier chapters to this story... but it's a tale that stands on its own... enjoy, if you will.
Work on Tuesday was over in a blur; it was that day, during my after work lesson when, for the first time, I actually felt as if I had some control over a surfboard after I'd stood up on it. Geoff had warned me about my client this afternoon, but I was looking forward to expanding my sexual knowledge through any new experience. I genuinely didn't know enough back then about how weird some folks could get in their search for an orgasm... I was eighteen going on forty, thought that I was invincible and most definitely knew it all. Go figure.
I showered and shaved after the surfing lesson was over; Mum had pressed my jeans... again, and I had to spend five minutes getting the creases out of them - there was no way that I was going to wander the streets looking that uncool - what would the women think?
There was a tall hedge separating the client's house from the road and her neighbours. As I walked up the pink gravel driveway towards the flat roofed, thirties-style double-bow fronted house, between dotted lines of mulberry bushes and hydrangeas, I couldn't help but think that the legacy had done her well.
We delivered our bread and twice weekly pastries to a breadbox outside the back door. Geoff had told me to ring the front door bell this afternoon. I did and waited... and waited... it was a string and spring bell which could be easily heard where I was standing. There was no way that she could not have heard it; maybe she was in the bathroom. I'd leave it another little while before I rang it again. From the porch looking outwards I noticed a flagstone and gap path leading across the lawn to a rockery clad pond attended by a large garden gnome frozen in the act of reeling in a fish. Beyond the gnome against the tall hedge, there was a line of white marble statues in various heroic poses. The place was plush. I thought that it might be worth trying to get a little extra for whatever it was that she wanted me to do.
Miss Stickland. Well she sure looked different away from work; gone were the half-rimmed spectacles and hair pinned strictly in a tight bun at the back of her head so that, from behind, she looked like she had stapled her hair down. At school she was renowned for a reckless attitude towards the generous applications of detention classes. She always wore plain dark skirts which dropped in straight lines to the floor, plain high necked blouses and (even in summer) waistcoat and jacket. Her skin always looked as if it had just been scrubbed and then left unadorned by makeup.
I was good at maths and was never at the bad end of her temper, but even I remember wondering if she was as mean to her boyfriend as she was to the guys at school.
There was time enough to survey the entire garden before I heard her loud footsteps coming across a wooden floor in the house. I turned before she opened the door... and nearly didn't recognise her. I could feel that my mouth was wide open, was aware that I probably looked like a gormless prat, but couldn't do any more than prevent myself from drooling.
Her hair was long and wavy, held back from her face by a flowered hair band - but hold on I'm starting at the wrong end... at least not from the end that first caught my attention. Her feet were shod in shiny black patent leather, open toed slip-ons with a four inch heel. Now she was very nearly the same height as me. She also wore seamed black stockings, so fine a denier that I remember that they seemed to shimmer.
I tried to drag my gaze upwards, but my body wouldn't respond at any more than a crawl as I feasted myself on her. I can remember it as if it was yesterday, not forty years ago. She was wearing an almost skin-tight dress that hung to just below her knees; it was shiny and black too, fitted to her slim waist to accentuate the curve of her hips. From there on up it just didn't stop getting better. It had a button-up front that was hardly being used at all - it was only closed to just below the centre of her black bra which I could see below the valley of cleavage, between breasts at least a million times more noticeable than they'd ever been at school.
Her skin was tanned and taut, only interrupted by the thin straps which both hid the lines of her bra and held the entire... creation up. Her hands and forearms were covered in posh, black, sequined, evening dress style opera gloves; in the hand that wasn't holding the door open, she held a ten inch long ivory cigarette holder containing a pink cigarette with a gold filter, a tendril of smoke curling upwards in the stillness of the air in her hallway. She was dressed more sexily than Emma Peel.
Her hair hung down in shimmering waves to her shoulders, framing a face with faintly rouged cheeks and flaming red lips. Her eyes shone with a liquidity to their blueness that I have never seen since. My God, I almost fell in love in an instant - cast to the winds was any thoughts of Gwendolyn, gone all plans for any future past right then. It was hard not drooling, believe me it was hard.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," she said. "I was just getting things ready upstairs."
"Miss Stickland. I-I... um..."
"Thomas, Thomas. You must call me Linda. 'Miss' makes me sound so old. Please come in. Would you like a drink?" She paused, and then said, "I'm having a dry martini..."
I'd never had one before, but I'm up for trying anything. "I'll have one of those then, please."
I closed the front door behind us and followed as she led me across a vast hallway that held a very impressive stairwell. She was in the money... deep in it, the place had half oak panelled walls below enormous paintings of generals and their like in ceremonial uniforms mostly on horseback amongst a scattering of women's portraits. I noticed them in an instant, which was all I was sparing from the rest of my attention which was concentrated on the view of her from behind. The dress clung to her body in a manner more dazzling than any iridescent carapace, highlighting the slimness of her waist and the fullness of her hips as she walked one foot in front of the other, sashaying from side to side; she knew how good she looked and was playing it up to the 'nth degree. But hey - I didn't care. Right then I'd have followed her through an active minefield with overlaying crossfire, and not have noticed anything else but her.
She led me into a drawing room decorated with ultra-modern cubist furniture and contemporary paintings on the walls to a drinks cabinet hidden in a large antique looking globe.
"Olive?"
"I don't know... I've never tried one."
"Then this will be the start of a number of firsts for you this afternoon."
She turned back to me and passed me a glass shaped like something from a cocktail party in a James Bond movie; there was a toothpick in it that held two dark green spheroids. I didn't know what I was supposed to do with them, so decided to follow her example and to do whatever she did with hers. The martini was sharp... now I know that it's called dry, but then I just thought that it was like a sharp electric shock on an alcohol cushion. The olive was strangely salty and yet undeniably moreish?
