Travelling round France visiting local museums, I had stopped for a couple of nights in the old walled town of Langres, at the northern end of Burgundy. The night I arrived, I saw a poster for a concert in one of the churches, which seemed like as good a way as any of spending a solitary evening.
I first saw her outside the church, picnicking and talking in a group of people beneath a statue of Joan of Arc: short-cropped vivid carrot-red hair, a large face with strong, high cheekbones and a tip-tilted nose, wearing jeans and a loose shirt.
The group turned out to be the choir which was giving the concert, and she was the lead alto, her sonorous, clear deep voice somehow matching her looks, and matching, too, the austere black garb she was wearing for the performance itself, which gave her a slightly androgynous look.
I took her image to bed with me that night, assuming that it would soon fade like all the other images of faces seen on my travels. But, the next afternoon, there she was, in the sun by the local lake, with another woman and a man, and wearing a black single-piece bathing costume, tight but discreet above, but when she rolled onto her stomach I could see how high-cut it was on her hips.
When she stood up I could at last sense her form, so completely sheathed at the concert; she was not tall, but with a strong figure, broad shoulders, a slightly fleshy stomach, tiny breasts that were just shallow swellings beneath her tight costume, but with a magnificent full bottom -- wide hips, deep and rounded, with richly fleshy bum cheeks that were virtually bare as she walked down to the water across the little beach. She swam strongly, far out into the lake, and, when she came out of the water, she showed something else: huge, hard nipples, swollen in the cool water and stretching the material that was pulled tautly across her chest.
Of course I watched her and her friends, wondering who was with whom; the other girl, slight and dark-haired, and sunbathing topless, seemed very relaxed and at ease with the redhead, as did the man. They lay chatting for half an hour; then the other two stood up, and I heard the redhead say she'd stay a little longer.
I had never picked anyone up on a beach, let alone speaking my halting French; but last night's concert was a possible pick-up line, and, of course, looking as she did, she would expect to be recognised; but I realised I could not have approached her if she, too, had been sunbathing topless. My first moves were trite: nice concert and so on; at least she didn't tell me to fuck off, and I sat down near her; Helène -- that was her name -- sat up, her knees up and her arms round them. With a wry smile, she talked about the vocal group, and how difficult it was to find suitable voices in a small town like Langres. After a few minutes, I made my next step.
"Would you like to have a drink?" I said, pointing at the café at the top of the beach.
"Yes, but not here; I am going back to Langres and there is somewhere nicer there; follow me as I drive."
As we went, I imagined the worst, a group of her friends, much French chat, and me soon making my excuses. But, when we arrived, she didn't seem to know anyone there. We talked over a bottle of wine, about Langres, where she had been for less than a year, and about my work, studying French art, which seemed to interest her. I didn't like to mention dinner, in case she suddenly said she had to leave; but then she asked me if I had seen the town's ramparts, and asked me if I'd like her to show me them.
Down on the beach, she had slipped on a loose skirt and a sleeveless black vest-like teeshirt with deep-cut armholes, over her bathing costume. When we had ordered our drinks she excused herself for a moment and went to the toilet with her bag; it was several minutes after she returned before I realised that she had slipped off the bathing costume and was wearing nothing beneath the vest, but, seated as we were face to face, I could see little more.
It was now after seven o'clock, the sun was lower -- it was mid-May. As we walked along the ramparts, Helène began by talking a lot, but soon seemed to realise that not much needed to be said, and we walked quietly together, relishing the evening light and the panoramic views. I kept glancing at her, and, when she was a half step ahead, I could glimpse her skin around the armhole in her teeshirt, which hung loosely, free of the shallow swelling of her breast; in the shadows, I glimpsed the vivid deep red of her nipple -- again, it seemed so huge in relation to the flatness of her chest, and its colour was so intense.
At a look-out point on the ramparts, we paused to look at the chart of the surrounding sights, and she did not flinch as our bare arms brushed; further on, we reached the large bastion which, I knew, was virtually the end of the circuit. Here again we paused, and I realised I had nothing to lose; I took her arm in my hand, and swung round to face her. For a disarming moment she looked quizzically up at me, and then dissolved into my arms, her mouth feeling up for my lips, her arms responding as I held her to me. With one hand I explored the firmness of her back, and then slipped my hand down to her flanks, feeling the beginning of the swelling and the softness of that marvellous bum that had amazed me on the beach. After a couple of minutes she came up for air and half pulled away from me.
"I'm sure you're hungry -- I've got some pizza if you'd like to come back to my flat -- it's very nearby."
I didn't know if this was a quiet indication that we had to call a halt, but of course I said yes, and we went to a studio apartment on the second floor of a house just around the corner, with the same extraordinary view over the surrounding countryside that we had seen from the ramparts. Would she rush to turn on the oven, or get out the coffee pot? Instead, she measuredly poured a couple of glasses of white wine, and took them over to the table by the window, where she stood waiting for me; and then we kissed -- wholly in earnest, this time, as we both knew.
She pressed her breasts and groin up against me and I pulled her towards me, my left hand behind her shoulder and my right feeling further down, grasping deep into the flesh of her bum and amazed by its combination of softness and firmness -- this flesh seemed so close to my hand, as I felt her cheeks through her soft cotton skirt; she wriggled between the twin pressure of my hand and my groin, rubbing herself against my rapidly swelling erection.
Next time we came up for breath I slipped my left hand round in front of her, brushed my fingers across her teeshirt and slipped them into the armhole, sensing the slight swell of her right breast and then meeting the harsh roughness of her nipple -- hard, protruding from her soft flesh. As I brushed it for the first time with my fingertips, a deep shudder went through her and her knees seemed to sag for a moment; I brushed it again and then gently rolled it between my fingers, and she pushed herself harder against my groin, moving in rhythm with my fingertips, till she let out a huge shudder -- and I suddenly had to take her weight as she slumped in my arms.
A short pause, and she looked up at me with a half smile, and reached down for my prick: unzipped me quickly and extracted it readily from my boxers, ran her fingers, a little sharply, up and down its length. Now I felt round her, running my hand deep under the cheeks of her bottom, into the soft flesh at the top of her thighs; with the other hand I tentatively felt down her front to her groin; she pushed against my hand and I felt the roundness of her pubis so vividly: where were her panties? and how could I feel the shape of her pubis so very clearly through the cotton skirt? I even pressed where I thought her clitoris should be and found it at once, as she writhed against my finger. Clearly there was just the one thin layer of cotton there. Quickly she gestured me over to the sofa that doubled as her bed -- wide, with a barrage of cushions along the back.
"Take your clothes off!" she said.
She quickly slipped off her vest, lying back on the cushions, wearing just her skirt, and for the first time showing me those extraordinary, huge red nipples. I took off all my clothes and lay beside her, reaching over to take her left nipple between my lips; she shivered again, and pulled me on top of her, spreading her legs beneath her skirt so that I was lying between her knees, and she could thrust her groin against my chest as I sucked at her nipples. She writhed around under me and soon came again, as I gently rasped my teeth along the roughness of the nipples -- their surrounds were quite narrow, though puckered as my teeth brushed across them, but the nipples themselves were wide and hard and protuberant.
