(A 3-part series, released in weekly sections. Penetration increases with each episode... enjoy the connection between the guys and girls that leads up to it!)
In the countryside in Australia, there is a town that time forgot. If you were shown a photo of the main street of Sevastopol in the heart of the Adelaide Flats, I'd challenge you to tell if it was recent or was taken in the 90s, 70s or 50s. Even the model of the utes parked at 60-degree angles on the street has been the same for thirty years, so that won't help you. And the rows of shops, they've had the same facade since before memory. And the sun still shines as bright and hot as ever. If the world was heating up, you wouldn't notice in Sevastopol, it had always been hot. If it's 42C or 44C on a summer day, what's it matter?
It was past mid-summer, but it was still hot. Tim Leigh-Lane sat at home during the first holiday break of his final year of high school. It wasn't unusual for the heat to run into autumn, but if it had been summer break instead of the short first-term break, his uncles would have taken him away to the beach in the south, or camping in the north by the Frome River. Instead, he was home alone, his mother was working and Tim had a homework project - design a tattoo, of all things.
Tim had taken the final year subject Design because of the high marks he'd gotten for his car design synopsis in Year 11. He'd argued with the teacher that tattoos were art, not design, but the teacher said no, because it needed to contour to the body part that it was 'designed' to cover.
"So I can 'design' an ass tattoo?" he'd grumbled.
"As long as you're happy to show a picture board of the design details and sketches from three vantages, feel free to do as you please, young sir," the teacher teased him. "Tattoos are designed for the body, there are no limits to where or what. Be innovative, be daring. But avoid being crass or vulgar. Tattoos are forever."
"I'll just go get one then," Tim pouted.
"You're eighteen now," the teacher shrugged. "Do what you like."
Tim was better than most kids at getting work done early, rather than panicking through a last-minute scramble. And so by mid-Monday morning there were 58 screwed up bits of paper in or around the bin in his room. And it was hot, even with the air-con. The project was trickier than he thought.
Turning to the internet for inspiration led to exasperation. There were so many elaborate ideas already made for everywhere that people had skin, even the penis. Being 'innovative and bold' seemed to have been exhausted already.
"Go small, be simple," Tim mumbled to himself. All the fantastic and imaginative tattoos had one thing in common, they were big, with big coverage. "Got to be small. Got to accentuate a piece of clean skin."
Teardrops on a cheek, or barbed wire round a neck; if they were the only tatts a person had, that gave them more impact. And what the teacher said was true, it wasn't just the quality of the artwork, it was as much what the tattoo was, what it represented, and where on the body it was put.
Tim stepped out for a break. Having direction was a nice breakthrough but he had no idea what to create. Under the back verandah was searing hot. Down under the willow at the back of the lawn was better, but with no breeze the flies were insane. Instead, he walked through the heat to the town centre, to the bakery to buy lunch. It wasn't yet midday, but he sat at the window counter to eat his sausage roll and sweetbread there, rather than trek his cream bun home through the heat. Looking at the general store across the street made Tim ponder - did he once see something there that might help?
Over in the store, down the third of three aisles, he found what he thought might be there. Temporary tattoos. A stack of them. Tim wasn't interested in the designs, but he was interested in how the shape might fit the body contours, and how each size and shape would look to draw with the angles of the three vantage points he needed. At ninety cents for a strip of mixed tattoos, he chose five different ones that were just black, no colour. Old Mr. Dawson didn't blink an eye at the counter, he just put them in a small paper bag like you would for a birthday card.
Just as Tim was about to walk out, the door opened.
"Kristy!"
"Tim!"
"What are you doing here?"
"Kicked out of residence."
Kristy lived next door. Sort of. Their house was behind Tim's house, on a different street, it was their shared back fence that made them 'neighbours'. And 'sort of' because Kristy was hardly ever there. Since high school started she had been boarding in Adelaide and going to a very Catholic girl school. The only time Kristy was out of residence was usually over the summer holiday, not a short break like then.
"My hall has a year-long refurb. The temp place kicks us out every holiday, not just the long ones."
"Oh."
When they were in primary school Kristy and Tim were close buddies, entirely androgynous best friends. They ripped three wood panels off the back fence in between their back sheds to use as a gate to each other's yards. When their parents found out, they laughed and replaced the hole with a proper sliding gate.
That was back then, though.
Now Kristy made Tim wobbly and nervous. She was not a primary school kid anymore, not by a long way. Think Nicolette Sheridan in 'The. Sure Thing', but with flat straight hair instead of that 80s frizz. She was almost as tall as Tim, a dirty blonde, a well-shaped, thin figure - bodies like hers were the reason little black cocktail dresses were invented.
Oh, and she was sweet, Kristy never used her looks and body for leverage.
Even so, Tim found himself trying not to stutter when he spoke.
"So... what... what's your plan this week?" Tim asked.
"I have one thing on my agenda for the week, to buy some girl things. And I'm doing it now. After that... nothing."
"Oh," Tim blushed, "Girl things? I'll let you be."
"No!" Kristy laughed. "Not that! My period has finished. Just other bathroom stuff. Come on, you can help me choose facial wipes."
Tim blushed at the mention of Kristy's period, and even Mr. Dawson turned to take another look at grown Kristy, who led Tim to a section of an aisle he had never stopped to look at. After ten minutes, Kristy had a razor, cotton buds, cotton wipes, moisturising lotion, sunscreen, and a Diet Pepsi, and for Tim she forced him to buy a face scrub - essentially soap with grains of dirt in it to grind all the muck off your face.
"You'll thank me for this," Kristy said. "Uncle Fred hasn't stopped using it since the day I got him some."
Tim didn't know what to think. Just the thought of Kristy thinking of him in the shower was enough to give the poor boy a boner.
"I can show you how to use it if you're worried," Kristy teased him.
That thought stunned Tim.
"You use it... in the shower?" he stammered.
"Well, you can!" Kristy laughed, "Or a civilised person might do it at the sink."
"Oh."
"Come on, I want a bakery lunch."
"Ah...I already had. An early lunch," Tim said, wishing he hadn't eaten so he could join her.
"Well then come watch me eat!"
There were only three stools at the window bench of the bakery, which were being used by a mother and her two little kids, so Tim and Kristy went to sit in the rotunda in the town quadrangle. The quadrangle is a piece of permanently green public land in town. Along with the gardens at the outdoor swimming pool, the quadrangle was one of only two places the local council thought important enough to use water on the grass, not something easily given away in rural Australia. All the town events and ceremonies were held there and it was one small point of civic pride. But on a stinking hot day like that, it was just Tim and Kristy sitting alone in the rotunda in an empty park.
"Forgive me, it's hot," Kristy said undoing three buttons on the shirt she was wearing and flicking it for the air to get through to her cleavage. There was nothing purposely sexual about it, just incidentally sensual.
"It must be hot wearing a bra on a day like this," Tim empathised looking straight at it, and the upper half of her breast above the material.
"It is, but... we were all told that unless we wear one every day of our life, when we get older we'll get saggy. Who knows if that's true but which girl wants to take the risk, right?"
Tim watched Kristy each lunch and tried and failed to stop glancing in onto her breast and bra. They talked about old times and new. Who was dating who, and who wasn't.
"I thought you were with Caroline? What happened to that?"
"Her parents," was all Tim said, and Kristy didn't probe. Tim and Caroline had been found by her dad doing things that by rights a proper young lady shouldn't do on the sofa at home, and her parents went nuts. No more Tim.
"You?"
"Catholic girls school with a Catholic boarding house, it's their primary aim to keep boys away from us and their secondary aim to educate us."
"Hmmm. Isn't your birthday just after new year? If you are already eighteen surely they can't stop you from doing what you want."
"I don't know. It's only been a couple of months. Theoretically, the house rules are the house rules but I haven't tested the theory yet. Fuck it's hot here, even in the shade. I wish there was some breeze."
Kristy fanned her shirt front again, making Tim fight not to stare into her clothes.
