Foreword
This story is fiction. Any resemblance to real people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental. Please also note that views expressed by characters in this story are not necessarily shared by the author.
For various reasons I haven't written anything for a while and I am particularly grateful to Randi for providing me with inspiration and for inviting me to contribute a story for the "
Wicked Games
" writing event. I hope you enjoy it.
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"How will you keep her?"
That was the question Sean Malone asked me when I sought his permission to marry his daughter. It was the late nineteen seventies and times were rapidly changing, but it was the end of an era that required young people to show respect for their elders. As a courtesy I felt it was important to ask Annie's dad for his permission, so we had the traditional conversation.
I never forgot the question he asked me, but I don't remember exactly how I replied. I think I told my prospective father-in-law that Annie and I would both get good jobs after graduating from university and we would be able to maintain a good standard of living. I know I promised him I would keep his daughter happy. He listened to what I said and wished me good luck, but I had the feeling he wasn't particularly impressed with my answer to his question.
While I was planning to marry Annie there were people being killed in Northern Ireland simply for being the wrong brand of Christian. Annie's family was Roman Catholic and she usually went to mass every Sunday. Her dad went to mass twice every Sunday. Even if he wasn't overly enthusiastic about my intentions, it was a relief to know Mr Malone didn't object to Annie getting hitched to me, William Robertson, a Scotsman by birth and a Protestant by upbringing.
I got to know Anne-Marie Malone during our first year at university. She was a redhead, with long hair the colour of burnished copper wire that cascaded over her shoulders and her blue green eyes sparkled like ocean spray in sunlight. Flower power and psychedelic colours were all the rage at the time and she liked to wear bright, flowery dresses or tie-dyed cotton tee shirts with jeans. She was incredibly pretty, with alabaster skin, a sprinkling of ginger freckles, a beautiful smile and an impetuous little laugh that brightened up any conversation. When she looked at me I felt as if an invisible force field held me in its sway.
Annie, as she preferred to be known, had come to Scotland to study social sciences at a lesser known Scottish university. Her parents were Irish, but they had moved to the north of England when Annie was an infant. Her family's home was in a row of small houses in one of those bleak northern English towns in the Manchester area, where her father was a self-employed building contractor. Annie had a younger sister, Teresa, who was still in high school.
To some extent I was in the same boat as Annie, having left my parental home in Glasgow to move across country to Scotland's east coast and study social sciences at the same university. For our first year, along with a couple of hundred other students, we had been allocated rooms in a student residence located on campus. Men and women were accommodated in separate blocks, but there was a shared dining hall and a sizeable common room and television lounge, so we could meet others and make new friends.
Although I was very much under Annie's spell from the moment I first met her, I was somewhat shy, having had little experience of socialising with girls or women. I had two brothers and I had gone to a high school that was boys only, so I wasn't very familiar with the female of the species. My friends were a bunch of young lads who were a bit nerdy or geeky. To be honest, I have to admit when I got to university I was still a virgin.
At the start of that first year at university there was no shortage of guys showing interest in Anne-Marie Malone. She was an Irish princess and she had them hooked with a bashful, downward glance, much like the one Princess Di perfected in later years. Plenty of guys dated her, but none stuck with it for longer than a couple of weeks. From what I heard, she wasn't interested in going beyond hand-holding and some fairly chaste kissing.
I was irresistibly attracted to Annie, but I didn't immediately ask her for a date, not just because I was too shy, but because it was abundantly clear that there wasn't even the tiniest trace of Bill Robertson on her radar. She knew who I was, but she had her sights set on some of the more athletic types. I was in good shape and kept physically fit by playing amateur football for a Sunday League team. I thought I looked okay, but I wasn't a stand out athlete, so Annie wasn't casting any glances my way.
Thankfully, another girl was interested in me and it wasn't long before I started going out with Sheena Wong Hui Ying. Sheena was a pretty Chinese girl from Edinburgh. With long, black hair and distinctly oriental eyes, she was proud of her ethnicity, but she had been born in Scotland and was also unquestionably a Scottish lassie. Like me, she tended towards agnosticism, but was tolerant of others' beliefs and rituals if they did no harm.
I kept tabs on Annie Malone, but Sheena Wong and I got on really well together. We had shared tastes in music and politics and she had a good sense of humour and was a clever and witty conversationalist. All in all, Sheena had a glass half full attitude to life and that rubbed off on me.
I grew more self-confident, knowing that Sheena liked me and she was happy to let me fondle her modest boobs and play with her cute pussy. When we got together I usually fingered her to orgasm and she jerked me off. As an early Christmas present, Sheena gave me a blowjob the night before we returned to our respective families for the winter holiday. She happily swallowed my load when I came in her mouth and I did my best to reciprocate, enjoying my first taste of pussy, which was delightful.
When we met up again after the turn of the year Sheena and I started going all the way. She had previously had sex with a former boyfriend and I suspect she knew I was a virgin, but she didn't ask. Instead, she helped me learn about sex and together we tried to improve our bedroom skills. I thought we were going steady, but towards the end of that first year, after we finished our exams, Sheena broke up with me. She did it as nicely as possible, I suppose.
We had gone back to my room after enjoying an evening out together, listening to a band playing Scottish folk music in the Students' Union. Sheena stayed the night, kissing and cuddling me after a nice session of soixante-neuf and hide the sausage.
After we woke up the next morning she told me she really liked me, but she felt we were just drifting along and our relationship wasn't going anywhere. She had decided to pull the plug on it, so we could both move on. Her decision had been reached before our end of year exams, but she waited until the exams were over to break the news to me. She said she wanted to make sure any unhappiness I might feel wouldn't interfere with my academic performance. She reasoned it was also good timing, because we were about to start summer break and that would help us deal with any bad feelings. I was both sad and disappointed, but I thought I understood Sheena's reasoning.
During the summer break that year I worked in a garage in Glasgow, learning about car servicing and maintenance while staying with my parents and saving money. Working on cars took my mind off my lack of a love life and the weather was good, so I was able to get out and about at the weekends, catching up with some of my nerdy friends from my school days. Most of them had gone to university or college in Glasgow and still lived with their parents. All in all it was an enjoyable summer break, with one major exception.
Sadly, my dear old granny died. My grandpa had died a couple of years earlier and granny never really recovered from losing him. I shed more than a few tears at her funeral, because she was such a lovely woman. My parents inherited her house and contents, but she left her modest savings to me and my two brothers. It wasn't a fortune, but I would be able to use some of it to buy a used car.
My workmates at the garage helped me find a Triumph Herald in good running order. It was a classy looking, four seat, hard top saloon car. There had been one previous owner, who had kept the white bodywork and chrome trim cleaned and polished regularly and it had just over five thousand miles on the clock. All in all, it was better value and more practical than a small sports car.
Very few of my fellow students had cars and when I got back to University that autumn I found having the car made me popular. The three guys sharing an apartment with me happily funded an occasional trip to a country pub. But the big plus point was when I found out I was now on Annie Malone's radar. She sought me out one afternoon when we both happened to be having a coffee break at the cafe in the Social Sciences library building.
"My first boyfriend had a car," she told me. "We used to drive to a place called Alderley Edge to go walking in the countryside and get some fresh air. It's a village in Cheshire where witches and warlocks got up to all sorts of sorcery and black magic hundreds of years ago."
Alderley Edge sounded like an interesting place, but I realised that wasn't the point of Annie's story. I wasn't stupid and I could take a hint, so I asked Annie if she'd like to go for a drive with me and maybe we could do some sightseeing locally. She accepted my offer, we made a date and that's how my courtship of Annie started.
To help with my expenses I worked as a part-time barman in a local pub on Friday evenings. I couldn't take Annie out on those evenings, so she usually went out with her girlfriends. We spent Saturdays together and met up for Sunday lunch after she had been to mass and I had played football.
I was a happy man, enjoying my new status as Annie's boyfriend. I would do anything for her, no matter how inconvenient. Annie 'borrowed' my emerald green football shirt, for example. Worn over a pair of jeans, it became one of her favourite casual outfits. With her red hair she looked great in that green shirt and I suspected I would never get it back.
