Apologies to my fans for not finishing Alice Takes a Cruise yet. It will be. Meanwhile here's a not-so-short story to be going on with.
They say men think about sex every nine seconds. I don't know if that's true for other men, but when I was eighteen it was certainly true for me. One way or another sex filled my head. At school, at home, on the bus, watching a film, reading the back of a cereal packet, whatever, I either had a hard-on or was trying to get one. Of course, I hadn't had any experience of actual two-person sex by then, so my stimulation wasn't exactly based on memory. More on wishful thinking.
I'd just finished school and was still wondering what to do with myself. My dad was going away for the summer with my stepmum, but I was at the age when the last thing I wanted to do was have a holiday with them. My sister had gone off to the Amazon to help dispossessed Indians or something worthy like that, so I was on my own. That is, until Jenny turned up.
Jenny was an old friend of the family. After my real mum had died, when I and my older sister were little, my dad had used her as a babysitter a lot. I can't think why, but she seemed to like us. I suppose she had that teenage girl's liking for small kids, like younger ones have for ponies. She was only about ten years older than us, but to us she seemed as old as a third parent.
It seems she was trying to finish some book or other and couldn't do it at her own home because there were too many distractions. I knew what she meant. I'd only been to her house once, but once was enough. She was the middle of five kids and the other four were all nutters, mad as hatters. Her mum and dad were 'artists' – or so they thought of themselves; they never sold a single painting as far as I knew – and they thought exercising discipline over children was something only Nazis did. God knows how, but Jenny grew up the sane one.
Anyway, there she was on the doorstep with a suitcase in her hand telling me my dad had offered her the use of our house for as long as she needed. No word to me, needless to say. What did his own son matter?
To give her credit, she was embarrassed. She even asked if I minded and said she'd go if I didn't want her there. But what answer can you give to a question like that? 'Yeah, I want the place to myself. Piss off.'
So I had a companion for the rest of the summer. Actually, given that I spent most of my time out and the rest in my room, she wasn't much of one. She was busy on her book in dad's study. Occasionally we bumped into each other in the kitchen or outside the bathroom, but the more occasionally it was the better I liked it. Sharing your home with your ex-babysitter is a weird experience when you're eighteen. I kept half-expecting her to stick her head round my door and tell me to turn my light out.
The summer dragged on. My friends from school drifted off, some to new jobs, some on bizzare gap year activities like teaching Siberian peasants Shakespeare or building wallaby houses in the Australian outback, some just on holiday. Before I knew it I was on my own. I woke up one morning and I had no one to hang out with, nowhere to go.
So I thought of sex.
It was early – well, 10.30 – and naturally I had a hard-on. What better way to start the day? I masturbated at least once a day, two or three times if I had the opportunity, and though I say so myself I was getting pretty good at it.
It's funny, but up to that day I hadn't really fantasized that much while trying to make myself cum. The physical sensation was enough. The pleasurable feeling of my fingers on my stiff cock was intense enough to blot out nearly all thought, other than just the hazy picture of a vague all-purpose girl who had no clearly defined features but with whom I was doing all sorts of exciting but unspecific acts leading swiftly to cries of pleasure, real on my part, sadly imagined on hers.
This particular morning, though, I never got to the cries of pleasure. Well, not immediately, anyway. With my hand working feverishly beneath my duvet and my eyes closed tight, I sensed rather than heard my bedroom door open.
A split second later my hand was a good yard from my cock. My eyes opened. Even so, I didn't really see Jenny. All I saw was the door closing. Then I heard a muffled 'Sorry' and hurried footsteps on the stairs.
I lay frozen with embarrassment for a good five minutes. Jenny had seen me wanking. Well, not as such. The duvet was over me. But as good as. By rights my cock should have deflated like a pricked balloon. But surprisingly it didn't. It stayed stiff as a poker. Whatever shame I felt, my cock obviously didn't share it. God, I thought with horror, maybe I'm an exhibitionist.
How could I look her in the face now? Say what you like, whatever your relationship with someone, to be seen masturbating by them changes it. Now I'd have to avoid her even more than I did already. I imagined her checking the laundry basket to look for telltale stains on my boxers. This was too much.
But then my hand crept back to my cock, still stiff, still hard and needing to be dealt with. I pulled back the foreskin and started stroking under the crown. Bliss. I closed my eyes. Well, she was hardly going to come back into the room now, was she?
And it was then the strangest thing happened. In my mind's eye I saw Jenny. Jenny peering round my bedroom door, watching me, watching my hand stroke my cock. And she was smiling, encouraging me. The image was like a gun going off. I came instantly, almost without me realising it was going to happen. At eighteen you get orgasms like that. Bang. It's over almost before you know it's coming. Even so, it was still a great start to the day.
Later, when I knew she must have finished breakfast, I crept to the bathroom. I knew she'd be busy in dad's study til lunchtime, but I was still reluctant to make too much noise. She might think I was trying to scrub away the evidence of my misdeeds. Then I dressed, grabbed some cash and was out.
That evening we sat either ends of the sofa, careful to be as far away from each other as possible. I was trying to read a new Grisham, but it was difficult with her watching the 10 o'clock movie, some romantic bollocks about a silly woman not realising she loves the hero, then finally realising she does. My mind wandered.
Needless to say it wasn't long before I had a hard-on. I was lounging right back on the sofa, my legs out straight, the kind of position my mum hated me to sit in when she was alive. Unfortunately it showed my cock was stiffening to anyone who cared to look. Almost in direct line of sight to the TV, the bulge in my jeans looked like a mountain to me. I tried to think of something to make it go away – politics, football, the film's drippy heroine – but it stayed resolutely hard.
I shifted my weight, tried to raise the leg nearest to Jenny so it might hide my bulge from her without being too obvious.
'Can't you sit still? I'm watching this.'
'Sorry.'
It was like being a kid again. I remembered how my sister and I had often sat either side of Jenny on this very sofa while she'd read a bedtime story to us. Maybe once someone has that kind of authority over you, they never lose it.
But my cock seemed to grow with every minute. The bulge in my jeans was sticking up a good two or three inches. It was getting painful. I had to move.
There was a sigh of aggravation from the other end of the sofa. 'Well, are you going to deal with that or aren't you?'
For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. 'Deal with what?'
She glanced disdainfully at my groin. 'That.'
