I often look out across the calm summer sea and watch as the sun's rays scatter and reflect off of the waves rolling gently against the shore. Such a tiny bit of light can conceal so many secrets.
On the surface my home town of Gideon's Gully is a thriving summer retreat, a home to retired artists, and a fishing community. It's a veneer I would come to respect, given its unique history.
I was eighteen and about to graduate from Susander Gideon High School. I had a knockout beach body and a pretty smile according to the boys, and yet somehow I was still without a boyfriend.
I'd never had sex, and it wasn't because I was uninterested. Other girls my age were skipping class to go down by the beach and party with the local surfing team, or giving blowjobs behind the bleachers after school.
To me dating always seemed too time consuming. I wanted to learn about the world around me and my school work felt important. Academia remains one of the only known avenues of escape from that place. That and marrying a sailor.
I would ride the bus home each day thinking about stories I'd heard from other girls. I watched Julia Howard lead Ashton Ward by the hand as they got off the bus together. They weren't a couple and it was common knowledge that her single working mom got home from her job late every night.
When I got home that evening I shut myself in my room and masturbated while thinking about Julia and Ashton. She always talked about going down on guys so I imagined him standing over her with his hand on her head and her lips around his cock.
I pulled up videos on my phone of girls sucking dick and watched with one hand down my pants as I thought about Ashton's erect penis sliding into Julia's mouth. Porn was my only outlet for many years. I'd sometimes get completely naked under the covers and pretend I was those girls, stroking my wet sex and moaning into a pillow until I got bored or had an orgasm.
I'd watch them gag themselves on ridiculously huge cocks, and spread my lips apart to imagine how it felt and tasted before he squirted his load on her face and tongue. The more I watched them the more it turned me on, but it also scared me.
"That'll be me some day," I thought, licking my lips and blushing while a woman with hair as dark as mine got sprayed with goopy cum. "If I ever meet a boy that is."
My actual first time with a man was very different from what I was expecting. My senior year economics class had us out doing research on local businesses, and that's how I found myself studying up on one of the oldest families in the little bay town.
They, or more accurately, he was known as the Dassarian. Chase Dassarian was the last surviving member of a family going all the way back to colonial times, one of the first to settle in the bay.
As kids we all looked in awe at his palatial home atop the southern tip of the crescent that cradled Gideon's Gully. Tall black rocks held it high above the waves while white crests beat thunderously against almost fifty feet of earth beneath.
We rarely saw Chase in town, and only the strangest locals knew him personally. When I asked Mrs. Grinkle, an old pie shop owner if she could help me get an audience with him she gave me a silent wall-eyed stare and, as usual, never opened her frog-like mouth to answer me.
"Uhh, would you just ... give him my phone number next time you see him perhaps?" I asked, pulling out a slip of paper and grabbing a dirty pen from beside the cash register. She stared at me the whole time I was jotting down my digits.
"High school econ report, Celeste Miller, please text me, smiley-face," it read.
Mrs. Grinkle didn't say a word. She just reached out and took my note with an expression that any foreigner would think of as tired disdain.
"Some people round here are just like that," I remembered my mom saying, referring to the old bank teller with the weirdly puckered mouth and huge eyes, going through the motions without blinking. It was, "small town syndrome," I thought. Some people in Gideon's Gully were just weird.
I smiled at Mrs. Grinkle knowing I wouldn't get a smile back and then thanked her for her kindness.
A day later I got a phone call.
"I'm sorry miss Miller, but I don't text," he said to me as I was pushing between throngs of other kids on my way through the school parking lot. "Meet me at the Boathouse Diner at eight if you want to talk." I started to respond but heard a click like someone hanging up a landline telephone.
I expected him to be a little odd. Everyone I talked to said he was a weirdo or a creep and that I'd have to have some balls to go out there and meet him in person.
I already had my own car so I didn't need anyone's permission to go that night. The Boathouse Diner is the nicest restaurant in town, catering to the vacationing rich from out of state. It's also conveniently close to the beach, giving anyone in its patio dining area a magnificent view of the waves coming in as the tide rises.
Somehow I expected him to show up with a retinue, like bodyguards or something. He came by himself and when I saw him, even though I'd only ever seen a photo of him once, I knew it was him.
I'm not sure what it was, the way he carried himself, the way he talked to the concierge, or maybe the hair. But he looked vaguely like something you'd see in a photograph from the nineteen-fifties.
Maybe it was his statuesque frame, or pale handsomely defined cheekbones. He looked almost like Apollo dressed in casual clothing with a brown frock coat on his shoulders.
When he looked at me I felt a tinge of warmth on my cheeks. Weirdo or no, the man was hot. The way he gazed into my eyes and smiled before introducing himself was almost too knowing, like he could see deeper into me than I was comfortable with.
To make matters worse I had let my nervousness distract me from my needs that afternoon and spent my whole evening preparing for the meeting. As luck would have it, it wasn't until seeing him that I realized how horny I was.
I reached out to shake and he cupped my hand between his palms and bowed before pulling out his chair and sitting.
