1975 was my first year at college. During summer vacation I washed dishes in a small family fast food restaurant in the small seaside town which was my home. The owners' daughter, Clara, was a waitress there. She was a knockout, and she knew it. She stood a shade over 5', and she had a round, unlined, baby face framed with tumbling, wavy, light brown hair. Her big blue eyes were crested with dark brows and, when she looked at you, eyes wide, with that almost surprised look, it was as if you were drawn in to the very centre of her. Her features were so flawless that she would have had the perfection of a china doll had it not been for her upper incisors being crooked: so slight that remedial dental work had never been considered, this imperfection was nevertheless enough to make her human rather than goddess. Most of the time she wore the shapeless pink nylon shift which all three of the waitresses wore: off duty, wearing jeans, tee shirts, light summer dresses, her figure was more obvious. She was a pocket Venus, voluptuous but trim. She was full of herself, knowing how good she looked, although I got on very well with her. I liked her, was frequently irritated by her, and I lusted after her, but from afar. I never even tried my luck with her.
The reason I never bothered trying was that Anne's family spent the winter in Spain, where she was into a heavy relationship with a young Spaniard. She never stopped talking about him, and those of us who worked in the restaurant were all sick of hearing how wonderful he was. So, although Clara was very sociable and would happily hang out with any of us outside work, she was so besotted with her Spanish love that any advances - and I had seen others make them, frequently - were met with a firm rebuff.
Summer vacation started late the next year, it seemed - it had been a very mild winter and a warm and sunny spring. I had a different vacation job, doing bar work - it paid better. But I remained on good terms with Anne's family and would pop in to socialise during the day. Clara had remained in Spain but would be coming back soon, and I looked forward to seeing her. I called in to the restaurant on her first full day back. She was working, and looked tired - she had arrived late the previous evening. I sat with a cup of coffee and she joined me as soon as there was a lull in work.
"Hi," I said, "How have you been?"
"OK," she replied. She didn't seem happy. She spoke quietly and secretly to me. "Look, I need to talk to you. When's your evening off?"
"Today," I said.
"Good. I'm off at 8 tonight. Meet me at the pier at half past."
I was puzzled but, as always, happy to be able to hang out with her. When she arrived that evening she was wearing, way ahead of her time, baggy combat trousers and a khaki sleeveless tee shirt which displayed the heaviness of her breasts. She looked great.
"We going on the pier?"
"No, I just want to walk."
So we walked, in companionable silence, along the sea front. At last, we reached the end of the road, and started to walk along the beach. And as we left the lights and crowds behind us, so she began to talk. We carried on walking as night fell and a full moon appeared in the cloudless sky, bathing the beach in silver light, and still she talked. We carried on walking, past The Point, right round to Golden Cove where, finally, we sat on the sand and watched the moonlight turn the flat sea into a silver mirror, and still she talked. She talked until the tide came in, up to the cliffs at The Point, and I sat and listened, occasionally replying or making some comment.
Clara told me of her relationship with the Spaniard, of how it had started when she was just a giddy teenager. She told me of giving him her virginity. She told me of the intensity of the emotion she had felt for him. She told me of the heat of the sexual relationship she had had with him. And through all this I tried to listen and respond with a maturity beyond my 19 years - although I had had several clumsy encounters with girls at college, I was deeply unsure of myself and far from experienced, and I had great difficulty in responding coherently to the catalogue of sexual activity pouring forth from the girl who had fuelled so many nights of fantasy over the last year. Even so, I did my best to provide a measured, thoughtful, sympathetic response to everything she told me.
And then, finally, she told me of the death of the relationship with the Spaniard, of how she had seen him with another girl, of how he had tried to lie his way out of it, of how, in the end, he had turned on her and said things calculated to hurt her.
We had been sitting side by side, and Clara had gradually started to lean on me, resting her head on my shoulder. I had put my arm around her, gently rubbing her bare arm. Despite our physical closeness and the heated, fevered, explicit content of what she had been telling me, somehow I felt nothing sexual at all - it was as if I was a visitor, hearing something which simply didn't apply to me. But I tried to comfort her as best I could through her tears, cuddling her for reassurance as she sobbed. No, nothing sexual at all.
And, as she spoke, I could hear her talking it all out, I could hear the hurt gradually ebbing away, to be replaced by anger.
"Do you know what he said to me?" she asked me, fire in her voice. "He said, "Yes, of course I fuck other girls. The only reason I've kept you all this time is so I have someone to fuck during the winter. And quite honestly, you're not even that good a fuck." The bastard!" I could feel her shake with suppressed anger. "That was what got me most. I mean, if it was true, he only had himself to blame, didn't he? I'd never been with anyone else, everything I knew I'd learned from him. What a shit!"
I agreed with her. She abruptly pulled away a little, and looked up at me. The moonlight was so bright that I could see the dried tear tracks on her cheeks.
"Poor you," she said with a slight chuckle. "Listening to hours of my misery."
"Friend in need," I said.
"Yes, friend indeed," she said, nuzzling up against me. "I never realised quite what a good friend, either. Well, I'll tell you what."
"What?"
"It must have driven you mad, hearing me go on about him all the time. But you'll never hear another word from me about him. Ever. Fuck him."
I laughed. "Or not."
She laughed, too. "Yes, or not."
Abruptly, she stood up. "Right, that's enough about that." She looked back to The Point. Where the tide had come in to the foot of the cliffs, Golden Cove was now cut off. "We're stuck here for the rest of the night, now. It's a lovely night, let's go for a swim."
"Oh.. OK, then," I said, somewhat taken aback by this rather unexpected change in mood. Hearing my tone of voice, Clara laughed. "Don't worry, I haven't gone mad, I just want to do something - I don't know - alive, vigorous, to wash all that horrible old stuff away. You coming?"
With that, she pulled the tee shirt over her head. She was wearing a bikini top beneath, tied with strings and quite small and daring for the 70s. It looked black in the moonlight, and seemed barely adequate to cope with her breasts. They were not particularly big but she was a diminutive girl and, for her size, they were full and heavy. I was stunned. This was the first time I had seen her so scantily clad. Her hands went to the waist of her combat pants.
"Err.. OK," I said, by which time the combat pants were off leaving a bikini bottom, also with string ties, smaller than the areas of body whiteness beneath it. "The only thing is I'm wearing underpants, not bathers." I was also acutely aware that, during the ten seconds in which she had stripped off her outer clothing, my penis had gone from somnolence to raging tumescence. I was, however, hopeful that the night would conceal it, especially if I was careful about how I positioned myself. I cautiously got to my feet.
Clara looked at me as I stood awkwardly, trying to arrange for a shadow to fall over my groin. She smirked. "Fair enough," she said, "don't want to get your drawers wet. Take 'em off then, we'll both skinny-dip." And, with that, she reached behind her and pulled the ties on her bikini top. It fluttered to the sand. As she turned towards the sea, I caught barely a glimpse of the dark tip of one naked breast before her back was presented to me. Then she began to trot to the sea, pulling the ties on her hips, and the bikini bottom also dropped to the beach. The moonlight was so bright that, even with her back in shadow, reflected moonlight from the sand showed the white untanned crescents of her buttocks against the dark of the rest of her, monochrome nude form silhouetted against the silver sea.
My shirt, jeans and underpants came off in one hurried stumbling scrabble, and I was chasing after her before she had reached the water. For a brief few seconds, there was simply sight and sound: my sight focused on her naked form jogging lightly down the gentle slope of the beach to the water's edge, and the sounds - oh, the sounds! So few, so quiet and yet so deafening. There was the small, regular sound of the tiny waves lapping over as the reached the sand. Then there was the scrunch of Anne's feet on the sand, and the first splashes as she reached the water and began to walk out. My own feet scrunched, too, reinforced with the bone-conducted impact of my feet hitting the beach at every trotted step. Then there was the thunderous pounding of my blood in my ears. And finally there was a slapping noise which I couldn't identify until, abruptly, I realised what it was - my erection, slapping into me from side to side with each step I took.
Clara, reaching mid-thigh depth, dived under the water and, before she came up, I dived forward too. It seemed almost dreamlike in the silent blackness underwater, and I swam and swam until my lungs were bursting, almost forgetting the sexual urgency which had driven me to strip and follow her so short a while ago. At last I broke surface, standing rib deep, taking a great breath and slicking my hair back from my face. I looked around, and Clara was about ten feet to my left, slightly closer to shore than I was, the water caressing the upper slopes of her breasts. Her hair, too, was slicked back, smooth to her head, black in the moonlight.
"Water's OK?"
"Warmer than I thought it'd be."
We swam, not talking, in leisurely parallels with the shoreline, maybe fifty yards, then turning and swimming back. It was calm, relaxing, and my erection subsided. After five or ten minutes, again without talking, we stopped swimming and started wading in to shore. Again, Anne's back was towards me, lit by the moonlight this time. I waded faster and caught up to her while she was still knee deep.
"Wait!" I reached out, my hand to her elbow.
"What?" She was surprised, and half turned. We faced each other, no more than two feet apart, and I looked down into her face, into those huge eyes.
"Can I....?"
"Yes?"
